Trigger notifications on scheduled category change but not on manual ones

Continuing the discussion from Published/Scheduled Posts 'Watching First Post' notifications not being triggered:

Enabling the disable category edit notifications setting prevents ‘Watching/Watching First Post’ notifications from being created when a topic is manually re-categorized.

This is very useful when cleaning up old topics and prevents the avalanche of emails that was common before this setting was implemented.

However, after a recent change in beta8, having that setting enabled now means that publishing (re-categorizing) a topic with a timer will not trigger any notifications to people who are watching that category.

It would be good to separate those two behaviors when the disable category/tag edit notifications setting is enabled:

  • changing category/tag manually doesn’t trigger notifications
  • changing category/tag with a timer does trigger notifications
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The change I made in beta8 was just to clarify the description of the site settings - it didn’t actually change any behaviour. But still, I totally agree that separating out the behaviour would be great.

The other case to consider here is ‘publishing’ topics from a PM or from shared drafts. So I don’t think ‘with a timer’ is necessarily the best way to separate it :thinking:

Is this kind of cleanup always done via the ‘bulk’ tools? If so… perhaps we’d be better off removing the site settings and having a checkbox available on bulk actions like “skip notifications for this category change”

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It might have been a later change. All I know is that notifications were being generated on July 31 but not on August 1.

Agreed. :+1:

I think that’s the direction that’s being explored:

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