# Viewing a list of users who are watching a category

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/viewing-a-list-of-users-who-are-watching-a-category/15225>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [2014年五月1日 18:01 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/viewing-a-list-of-users-who-are-watching-a-category/15225 "2014-05-01T18:01:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 10

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**Author:** ![wesochuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/wesochuck/32/108706_2.png) [@wesochuck](https://meta.discourse.org/u/wesochuck)\
**Post date:** [2015年十月23日 14:51 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/viewing-a-list-of-users-who-are-watching-a-category/15225/10 "2015-10-23T14:51:48Z")

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Since our major goal was to provide this information to moderators, we used the badge system to accomplish this for our purposes.

Here is what we did:

1. Created a badge that mirrored the category name
2. Set the badge trigger to run daily
3. Used this SQL for the badge query

````plaintext
    select user_id, current_timestamp granted_at from category_users
    where notification_level = 3
    and category_id = 15
    union all
    select id, current_timestamp granted_at from users where mailing_list_mode = 't'```
 1. notification_level = 3 ~~ means they are tracking the category
 1. category_id = 15 ~~ is the category number that we're using the badge to represent
 1. mailing_list_mode = 't' ~~ says if they are in mailing list mode (getting notified for ALL messages into the system) then we will also count them as a subscriber for the category too.

Now a moderator can look at ```/badges``` and determine who is Watching their category.

There are a few tweaks that we should do to improve the badge on the SQL, those include:

1. Someone could be in mailing_list_mode, but they might have MUTED a category, we should take that into consideration
1. notification_level could possibly be switched to >= 2 so it would also capture if they were TRACKING or WATCHING a category.

The release of the data explorer could also be a big help, we just haven't had a chance to play with that much yet.
````

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/viewing-a-list-of-users-who-are-watching-a-category/15225)._