Watching Categories based on on group in discourse

[watchmanmonitor (Allen Hancock)]

One day this functionality will be in Discourse core, and I will be even happier with the product.

See also

Override existing user preferences

Good points @Mittineague but where I need this is in cases where: there is a new feature in discourse and I need to set its value for everyone retroactively if I add a new Category and want it to be in everyone’s Watch list by default (they can unfollow if they want) if we are generally changing how the forum works for whatever internal politicking reason. In all of these cases, the need here is to be able to Fix Our Forum for our users. If I expected to have to use this feature regularly on…

and even more relevant:

Make members of a group watch a category by default

We have a private category, limited to a particular opt-in group of Discourse members for our organization. Say it’s “staff” – it’s not actually, but it’s along those lines. I want to make sure that all staff receive prompt notifications of discussions in that private category. We encourage them to set their category settings to “watching” but I don’t think many of them have. Under the category’s security settings, when I say “staff can create/reply/see” I’d love it if there were a way to sa…