Watching category mandatory

[ondrej]

Welcome to Meta @pkoevesdi

It isn’t possible to force users to un-watch a category easily out of the box.

If you wanted to ‘force’ all users to watch a category there is the default categories watching site setting. If you wanted to ‘force’ all users in a group there is discourse.example.com/g/your-group-name/manage/categories and you can change what categories you want those group members to watch.

However, members could change these whenever so if you wanted to ensure they always watched the correct categories you would have to keep going back to those settings and changing them to reset the users watched preferences and make them follow the category again.

Another way is to hide the watching, tracking, normal etc… buttons on the site and hiding the preferences/tracking user preferences using CSS. There is a guide on how you can customise your site below

Make CSS changes on Your Site

Want to make some CSS changes on your Discourse site but not sure where to start? You’ve come to the right place! You only need to read this topic if you’re very new to CSS. If you already know how to write and add CSS to your Discourse site, then you will most likely not need to read this topic. We’ll cover a few subjects. We’ll start with a brief introduction of what CSS is and some terms that you need to know. We will then move on to how you can add CSS to your Discourse site. Final…

However, a caveat is that any computer savvy user can bypass such customisations if they wanted for example the use of safe mode.