The discussion revolves around the default behavior of group PMs in Discourse, specifically the lack of email notifications when a user is added to a group. alehandrof points out that users are only notified by email when @mentioned in a group, but not when a group PM is sent. fefrei agrees and mentions that users cannot track a group inbox unless a message has been sent to it.
The conversation highlights the need for a site-wide setting or per-group setting to make users watch group PMs by default. rriemann provides links to previous feature requests and proposes a spec for adding an option to settings. sam offers to implement the feature, and codinghorror agrees that there is consensus on the issue.
However, tobiaseigen raises concerns about the group messaging UI being incomplete and not ready for ordinary users. rriemann argues that the proposed change should not be postponed, and sam eventually implements the feature, making all groups default to “watching” except for the moderators group.
The implementation allows admin groups to customize the default tracking state, and users can also change it manually. alehandrof asks for the simplest way to change the settings for multiple groups, and rriemann provides a shell script to update the notification level for a whole group.
I noticed there’s been some work around groups recently. But there’s a glaring omission still to make group PMs useful for my community: email notifications are turned off by default.
Is there a way to make users watch group PMs by default instead of just tracking them?
Users are already notified by email when a group is @mentioned – why not do the same for group PMs? Either by a site-wide setting or, ideally, on a per-group basis.
I’m pretty sure there’s a Contribute > Feature request for this flying around somewhere…
I also find this pretty lacking, especially because a user cannot actually track a group inbox as long as no message has been sent to it.
Owie, that hadn’t even occurred to me. The UI around group PMs is clearly incomplete 
(And last time I checked email notifications for group PMs were still confusing.)
This problem has already been addressed at least twice, but there is not yet a solution. I would pretty much be in favour of a setting in the admin board to make people watch per default groups right after they joined.
Please Discourse @team, consider this feauture for your todo list.
This is the behaviour expected from other networks, e.g. Facebook. As soon as one gets a group message, it is pushed to the user.
Proposed spec:
Sure I support this feature pr-welcome
A hearty 
for anyone willing to work on this. Tracking by default is not useful for any of the scenarios we can see. Watching is the way to go!
As long as we do not have a pull request, one could maybe find the one-liner to monkey patch the source using pups.
I didn’t even realise this was a thing. It explains why a group member I talk to is so tardy with replies (because he mostly uses email to interact with discourse). Seems crazy to me not to be the default!
Same here. I thought I was just surrounded by slackers but they didn’t even know they had a message waiting for them. 
@codinghorror what if I turn the default volume up for now and default to watching, it seems less bad than the alternative of people confused why groups don’t get emails.
I can special case moderators to tracking
Otherwise we need to add a global default and group default, not against it, but its more work.
Sure there seems to be consensus here.
I am happy about this development but concerned because the group messaging UI is otherwise still a work in progress. It just doesn’t seem ready to me for use by ordinary civilians.
We have many groups we use for mentioning already and prefer not to encourage people to use for messaging.
My main issues, documented elsewhere, (will add links to relevant meta topics when I get to a computerupdate: added links when I got to a computer..) are..
I see that there is room to push things even further, but I do not see why the proposed change in this topic should be postponed. Nobody has to send messages to groups.
I agree. No need to wait but don’t forget this feature on email notification footer so users know it’s a group PM
I can add my support for improving this, after I had to deal with some confused users. I also note that in my case (rather small group) I would have been happy to change tracking state manually, but that doesn’t seem to work, as per:
Unless I missed it, I don’t believe this happened. The concern about missing emails just came up again:
Yeah, this is on my list and assigned to me… I will get to it.
Per:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/7a9eee1b71cf298210ee9a258e9f17ae1a8a9af7
All groups except the “moderators” group have default tracking state of watched, in admin groups you can customize this to whatever.
Note, the default applies when people are added to the group, to apply retroactively simplest thing to do is add/remove user from group, or visit user profile page and change it there.
Wohoo, thank you so much 
Note that this will not work right now: