Note that muted categories disable any kind of notification, including mentions and tracking when you reply. This is a terrible user experience if enforced by default.
The way you want to use discourse sections is not how the software is designed.
I just check my unread tab and notifications, and Iâm never getting any topic from the communities I donât track.
A workaround for your specific usecase seems to track all categories and tags you care about and bookmark the following url
Thanks for the pointer. The Defer (Aufschieben) option was not visible in my interface. It seems it is disabled by default and you have to enable it in preferences. This is helpful and seems like having it enabled by default would make sense.
I must say I am quite frustrated by your statements here, @nukeador. I put forward what I thought was a reasonable suggestion for all users. In response youâve repeatedly told me Iâm using the software wrong, and mis-charactarised my suggestion as a single user specific, niche use case. To me this comes across as quite condescending and I donât appreciate it.
My suggestion is admittedly not ideal (as is often the case with Discourse it seems), but stating that the software is not designed for this is just factually incorrect. Iâve read a number of threads on meta.discourse.org discussing the available settings for muting some or all categories by default so that users can opt-in rather than opt-out. This is an intended use case for communities with a wide range of categories and users that are expected to only be interested in a subset.
Fully agree, the feedback we get from long time (old) forum users is that they feel intimidated by the large amount of (mostly irrelevant) information. In my case I already added more than 20 categories to my ignore list. Telling every user how to locate the respective settings in their user profile adds an additional burden for inexperienced users.
The way I ended up âsolvingâ the ânoiseâ problem was sticking to mailing list mode and using filtering rules to handle the received emails. Filtering by top-level forum and by user is possible; the downside is that there might eventually be a lot of busy top level forums to copy and paste rules for. Filtering by tags is less important since tag use on e.g. the old help site couldnât be relied upon, although it would be a worry if an attempt was made to have logically very different forums shoe-horned into one, separated only by tags. âNew threadâ posts are obviously not possible until that has been turned on per forum.
A major advantage is not having to use Discourseâs UI for reading or replying, so no more text boxes whizzing off the top of the screen.
Somehow this hidden/muted category concept is indeed a bit weird. Think opt-out vs. opt-in as mentioned earlier on.
Ideally, you would only see a few predefined categories, which are relevant for your local community. Once youâre a bit more familiar with the platform, you could add further categories youâre interested in. If youâre happy with the predefined list, thereâs nothing else to do. This is at least how many messaging platforms work.
Are you certain about notifications on a mention? I muted many of the community sub-categories. I am not familiar with their area and also do not speak their language. So why would I want to be notified about some latest posts in their category?
But if someone would mention me, for whatever reason, then it might be still nice to have a notification.
I hoped to have a notification in the top-right area or even by email.
Considering a direct mention less important than a category-mute sounds like a bug to me.
Was this logic already discussed up-stream?
I only wanted to put the pros and cons of your proposal, that in my personal opinion introduces a few issues by forcing a full mute to some categories to everyone, that will directly impact anyone interested in the named categories.
My understanding of that âanythingâ is that you wonât get mentions or notifications about replies to you, because the Normal level describes clearly you get mentions and replies to your messages.
Do you have a âplaygroundâ instance somewhere, where you could simply try this?
Then it would be less speculation about the exact behavior.
If this is the âpriceâ, then at least for me it is still worth it. I am absolutely not interested to see any notes about new content (/latest) in Serbia, Belgium, Russia, Mexico or the other local communities I do not participate. And if that is the only way to filter, than itâs like this.
If you want to make a test topic in the Thailand category, you could just delete it after. I have that category muted, so you could @ mention me to test if I get a notification.
Aber wenn man direkt erwÀhnt wird ist das durchaus in Ordnung. Und wenn man es doch nicht interessant findet, kann man es ja bestimmt wieder auf mute setzen.
So it seems that a âglobalâ mute of the sub-categories for a local community would not harm that much.
Singular posts still can have differing notification levels and a mention will automatically enable it.
