A bug was reported where tag watching does not work for non-staff users when a tag is part of a Tag Group, as the tag disappears from the /my/preferences/tags page and the watching preference isn’t applied. nathank identified the issue, noting it persists regardless of permissions. tomitomas confirmed the problem and asked for updates. blake pointed to a fix in Discourse 2.8.0, referencing a commit that resolved the issue by ensuring watched tags are correctly returned in the user serializer response. nathank confirmed the fix works, though noted a limitation: tags in Tag Groups visible only to specific groups no longer appear in the watched list for users who can’t see them, which affects a previous use case but is likely intentional.
When I include a tag in a tag group, it disappears from the /my/preferences/tags page for non-staff users. In addition, the watching preference is not applied despite it looking fine in the database.
This is regardless of what is chosen in the permissions settings for the Tag Group:
If I delete the Tag Group, the tag watching starts working normally for those tags.
This does sound somewhat odd and something we should sort out.
Hi @nathank
Did you find something ?
Get any update on this ?
As you mentioned this might also be the same issue as the one Im talking about in my thread.
Not as yet - that is up to the Discourse team. I’m sure that they will let us know when they’ve had chance to address it. It is the holiday 
period!!
But if you need your Tag watching to work for now, just remove those tags from any Tag groups they are in (or delete the Tag groups) if you can live without the Tag group functionality.
Hi @nathank
Thanks for the feedback !
Unfortunately, group tag seem to be used on the website.
I see that a new version of Discourse [2.8.0] was released 4 days ago.
Did you apply the update, is this issue still here with it ?
This problem should be fixed now actually!
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/12f041de5d5ff147e82ab3d16132f0f5ad06d389
Tags in tag groups that have permissions set to everyone were not able
to be saved correctly. A user on their preferences page would mark the
tags that they wanted to save, but the watched_tags in the response
would be empty. This did not apply to admins, just regular users. Even
though the watched tags were being saved in the db, the user serializer
response was filtering them out. When a user refreshed their preferences
pages it would show zero watched tags.
@nathank can you verify when you get a chance?
Hi @nathank
hope you’re doing well.
did you have any time to try the update ?
does it fix our matching issues ?
thanks for your help !
Haven’t yet sorry but will try to tonight.
I think that this is now working just fine.
I did notice something that isn’t great for my use-case, but is probably intended:
When I make the Tag Group visible to only a specific group, the tag does not appear in the watched list of those who can’t see it (nor does it apply). I used to use the tags to ‘bump’ the topics up to a higher watching state without regular users being able to see it. I can’t do that any more but that is fine.
