Update Thu 8 April:
This change was successfully released on Tuesday 6 April 2021. Changing the category of a topic no longer sends a ‘new topic’ notification for users who are subscribed to that category.
We’re changing the behaviour of the ‘change category’ moderator action. When any topic is moved to a different category, a ‘new topic’ notification will no longer be sent to users who are subscribed to the category.
The aim is to enable you as moderators and community managers to silently move content between community categories. That means no more stress / worries about spamming end users when you’re doing a category restructure.
This new behaviour applies both when changing the category of a topic from the moderation overview, as well as directly from the topic moderation page.
Some of you may remember that a long time ago we published the following product research article on this topic.
We concluded that the notification behaviour was generally unhelpful except in a few edge cases where superusers could see email notifications about new topics. As a result, we decided that it would be most effective to completely remove the notification. In addition, we felt the notification that the topic is ‘new’ is simply not accurate, since it’s been moved from another category and has not been newly posted.
Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions.
