Overview

Your users are getting email notifications for each comment or response on discussions, posts, blogs, and other content. You would like to know:

• If there is a way to disable these notifications.
• If there is a global setting or individual setting to manage this.

Solution

There is no global setting to disable updates for contributions to new content, but on the individual level, there are options that can be configured to achieve this effect.

1. Email notifications for replies and updates to content items mostly come from the items under the "Inbox Notifications" section of user preferences and "Following" under News and Stream Notifications.
2. It is possible to either turn off notifications entirely by unchecking the email checkbox for each of the items or by reducing the frequency of notifications to a desirable level. Please note that under "Inbox Notifications", if the notifications are turned down, for example to Daily Summary, It is replicated for all the items in that section. That said it is still possible to combine this with completely turning off (unchecking) specific items.
3. Similar actions should be taken for "Following" in the News and Streams section.
4. Finally, because news streams only send emails for new content, once we ensure that the right content and audiences are configured in the various news streams, they will always be notified of new content. You will notice that the checkboxes for enabling or disabling emails for news streams are disabled in user preferences. This is because that is set in the configuration of the news stream itself. For example:

In summary, to turn off notifications for everything else other than new content, it will be necessary to ensure the places of interest are configured in news streams while other email notification options are either turned off or configured to be sent with reduced frequency as desired.