I’m confused. Which probably explains why I’ve had some very confusing conversations with my users about their notifications.
The instructions when you’re watching a category from a category’s page are:
You will automatically watch all new topics in these categories. You will be notified of every new post in every topic, and a count of new replies will be shown.
(BTW, the language here should be changed to singular: “this category”.)
The instructions when you’re watching a category from your preferences page are:
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 posts will also appear next to the topic.
(My emphasis in both cases.)
There’s a subtle difference between them that I hadn’t noticed before. What I thought happened once a user started watching a category is that they would be notified of “every new post in every topic”. But it sounds like they will only be notified for posts in new topics. Is this correct?
If so, this is weird. And it creates a problem for me. Like others Discourse users I’m trying to use the watch feature to create mailing lists by watching categories.
Here’s my plan. We have committees (<10 people each). I want them to be able to communicate easily, while leaving a record of their discussions outside of their email. For each committee I set up a group on Discourse along with a private category. I use a plugin to make the users of each group automatically watch the appropriate category.
I’ve luckily only rolled this out as an option to two committees to test out. We likely haven’t been affected because the creation of the groups, the categories, and the topics all coincided. But of course this won’t be the case when new members join the committees.
I chose to Discourse with this plan in mind: to move our Basecamp groups which only need a discussion space to our community forum. So I’d like to see this issue addressed somehow.
What’s next?