What should the procedure be for posting things that fall into multiple categories?

(Split this out to a new topic in in the meta category; hope you don’t mind)

That’s a great question, and something I was thinking about myself as it just came up in another thread recently, albeit for a somewhat different reason. As far as I’m aware, Discourse doesn’t have a built-in feature for cross-posting, aside from just making two separate posts.

However, while it may be a bit of a hack, if you want to ensure that users watching two different categories get notified of a thread, you can post it in one category, wait 15 minutes, and then edit the OP to change the category to the second. While it won’t show up for users manually browsing the category afterward, it will notify users set to “watching first post” or higher in both categories, and should (AFAIK) also send emails to users in both. This is, effectively, what ended up happening in this case, though not entirely by design.

I actually didn’t realize it was present either until several weeks later, when I happened to see it, and I’m one of the three-ish active mods. Seems like there could have been a post on Discourse Feedback (which could be renamed #meta or similar) or another existing category announcing it.

However, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t a built-in feature to change default notification settings for a particular category for all users (users have to set this individually), though there apparently are some plugins that enable this.