You can't, users need to watch categories themselves since watching a category will cause them to receive notifications/emails about new topics. This is to ensure you don't have 100s of thousands of users automatically watching categories.
@baris Shouldn't that be up to an administrator to determine whether this is acceptable for their forum or not? We're trying to get a society to use nodeBB but if we can't even get notifications to users in an "Announcements" category without having to tell them they have to click buttons to turn the feature on, it's just another barrier to getting people moved to the forum and having them return when there's activity.
Is there another path for a very small group / community that gets notifications/emails to people by default when there's activity? If not, why would we migrate out of an email distribution then?
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Change default category watch state for administrator | Spyke
You can't, users need to watch categories themselves since watching a category will cause them to receive notifications/emails about new topics. This is to ensure you don't have 100s of thousands of users automatically watching categories.
@baris Shouldn't that be up to an administrator to determine whether this is acceptable for their forum or not? We're trying to get a society to use nodeBB but if we can't even get notifications to users in an "Announcements" category without having to tell them they have to click buttons to turn the feature on, it's just another barrier to getting people moved to the forum and having them return when there's activity.
Is there another path for a very small group / community that gets notifications/emails to people by default when there's activity? If not, why would we migrate out of an email distribution then?