Change default category watch state for administrator

[Twissell]

Hello!

How can I change default category watch state to watching for specific administrator?
Is it possible to do with plugin?

[baris]

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.

[Twissell]

I got the point

That seems reasonable.

[kinetix]

@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?

[baris]

If you really want every user to watch a category I would suggest using a plugin to automatically watch the category on user creation. It can be done with the action:user.create hook.

// in plugin.json
"hooks" : {
  "action:user.create": "onUserCreate"
}

// in library.js of your plugin
const categories = require.main.require('./src/categories');
plugin.onUserCreate = async function ({ user }) {
  const announcementCategory = 1;
  await user.setCategoryWatchState(user.uid, [announcementCategory], categories.watchStates.watching);
};

[kinetix]

@baris Thank you for the detail, and please pardon my ignorance - is that code snippet an entire plugin unto itself that I could add in? (I haven't looked at how they're added in manually yet, what the minimal code looks like, etc)

[baris]

It is not an entire plugin but it's the only code you need in a plugin to achieve what you want. A plugin has some boilerpate code. You can see a full starter plugin at https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-quickstart. The plugin docs also go over the details https://docs.nodebb.org/development/quickstart/

[kinetix]

Ah, got it, thank you!

[kinetix]

@baris Hmm, ok, I think I'm close to having built this small plugin. It's tripping up on the setting of the watch state, with:

error: TypeError: user.setCategoryWatchState is not a function

The only thing I've tried to deal with this error so far is to add in to library.js:

const user = require.main.require('./src/user');

And unfortunately that didn't change anything with regard to the error. I presume I'm close here but am not sure what else is missing to cause the lack of the function.

[baris]

Can you put your plugin up on github or similar so we can see? That function is here so the below should work

const user = require.main.require('./src/user');
const categories = require.main.require('./src/categories');
await user.setCategoryWatchState(user.uid, [announcementCategory], categories.watchStates.watching);

[kinetix]

Hmm, ok, I wonder what I'm doing incorrectly then. Maybe I stripped too much out of the quickstart or I haven't done something properly when updating the library.js? Here's the code:

https://github.com/realkinetix/nodebb-plugin-auto-set-watch-categories

[baris]

This should work

plugin.onUserCreate = async function (hookData) {

  const announcementCategory = 1;
  await user.setCategoryWatchState(hookData.user.uid, [announcementCategory], categories.watchStates.watching);

};

[kinetix]

Hmm... closer, the error is different now:

error: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'user')

I've pushed the changes to my repo.

[baris]

@kinetix You haven't used the code I posted, it should be (hookData) not ({ hookData }), it should work once you fix that.

[kinetix]

@baris Sorry about that - yup, that got it. Thanks so much for the clue bats!