We have several sets of users who are enrolled on courses in various roles but are not expected to participate actively. These are typically users such as:

• Administrative Staff who typically require access to courses for various admin tasks
• eLearning assistants who are often enrolled on courses whilst they assist tutors with various aspects of course creation

With these roles and their expected usage, we've been asked to disable all notifications so that the users aren't unduly spammed and as such we've prevented capabilities such as:

• mod/quiz:emailconfirmsubmission
• mod/quiz:emailnotifysubmission
• mod/feedback:receivemail

We used to use the mod/forum:initialsubscriptions capability to ensure that these users aren't initially enrolled in forums on the course, but this capabiity was removed in MDL-30151 as part of some simplifications

I'd like to suggest that something is added back which allows roles of this nature to not receive lots of notifications by default.

It's quite conceivable for users who are in these roles to be students in other courses - this is certainly the case for the eLearning assistants, and we're also looking at the possibility of running courses for training various in-house tasks (e.g. use of MIS, finance, admissions, etc systems). As a result, asking users to set their initial subscription mode in their profile probably won't cut the mustard.