I guess I was the idiot that thought the answer to this question would be Yes. Even though I’ll admit that the label clearly says otherwise:
You will automatically watch all new topics in these categories. You will be notified of all new posts and topics, and a count of new replies will appear for these topics.
So for our low volume list, I guess our options are:
- Put the user account in mailing list mode (Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category))
- Not likely to happen because this group is only truly interested in about 1/10th of the traffic happening on the site and it would be a lot of muting
- Set all topics in the category to auto-close within XX days so that folks can’t reply to old posts forcing them to create new posts so that any new users watching the category will get properly notified
- Our most viable option, though since many of them send in replies via email, I’m sure it will lead to some confusion when their messages are bounced back due to a closed thread
- Have new users go into each topic in a category and watch any topics they might be interested in
- Probably not feasible because although we’re low volume, we still have a couple of hundred topics in there
Of course this issue just happens to be manifesting itself with the category that our C-level folks use for their mailing list which makes troubleshooting and suggesting workarounds a bit of a delicate tap dance.
@tobiaseigen does my scenario sound similar to what was happening with your users?