Are you all sick of me “working with the garage door up” yet? I hope not.
I’ve made a change to notifications, as a next step in this whole thinking-through: I’ve removed the default setting of watching-first-post on #public
(What’s watching-first-post? …see, Controlling notifications )
Here’s the trade-off calculus:
Newbie/freebie people have to be able to post somewhere, and that somewhere is #public. That means I cannot ensure someone doesn’t waltz in jump on the coffee table and post. (There’s a lot that Discourse prevents—spam, pron, etc… but we do want new people to be able to say “Hello! I’m here, so excited, etc.”)
Originally, I had watching-first-post set to on, so everyone would, well, notice! But it’s too much—or it will be too much very soon. So I’ve turned it off. I’ve turned off the default—as described in my notifications-howto link above, you can absolutely turn it on for yourself with a few clicks. Boom! All the notifications you want… I’m simply no longer assuming you want all of them.
I’ll let this simmer for another day…