The discussion revolves around a perceived inconsistency in Discourse’s email notification system for unlisted topics. Users with the “Send me an email for every new post” setting receive notifications for unlisted topics, even if they haven’t participated, which some argue is a loophole. While unlisted topics don’t appear in digests, the email setting is triggered by new posts, regardless of visibility. The community acknowledges this as an oversight, with one user suggesting a fix and another highlighting a real-world issue where a pre-release announcement was leaked due to this behavior. jesselperry and codinghorror debate the intended behavior, with ljf providing a practical example of the problem.
While unlisted topics don’t get sent out on digest (correct behavior for sure IMO)…
Users with the “Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category)” preferences checked get every update to an unlisted topic, even if they have not participated in the topic.
Repo:
User B has “Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category)” setting on
User A posts new topic, User B gets email about new topic
Admin unlists topic
Subsequent posts to topic get sent to User B, even though User B never participated in the topic
Unlisted topics don’t appear in digests though. So I would think similarly they shouldn’t be sent out for users with the every new topic setting checked.
For instance if posts are being discussed like this where they need to stay private (although not guaranteed private of course if someone happened to have the link):
Of course emails should still go out to anyone that happened to have gone in & marked the topic as Watching or Tracking, but to receive email updates to a topic they otherwise never interacted with seems like a loophole to me.
However Ruby and whatever else involved to fix this would be way over my head. I really would love to contribute if I could. However in the meantime I think my efforts towards the Discourse project are best served finding nuanced bugs
Regardless, I would argue that admins expect those topics to be completely hidden to users that aren’t otherwise already involved in the topic. As I said, this seems like a loophole as virtue of the email me every new post feature, not an intended behavior admins would expect.
Just as posts to hidden topics don’t appear in a user’s /activity/posts - technically that’s not a list of topics either, but those posts aren’t listed there.
We discovered the same problem. We were preparing a topic announcement about the new version of our software for tomorrow and tada someone share it on social network before the D day !!!
Moderation feature and email notif can also be an (other) issue.
I really would love to!