The discussion is about the “Hide Muted Categories” theme component, which hides muted categories from the category list. The component is maintained by the Discourse team and can be installed from the GitHub repository.
Discourse explains that the component is useful for sites with many muted categories, as it improves discoverability. However, some users have reported issues with hiding specific sub-categories.
Jason_Schulke asks if it’s possible to hide specific sub-categories from appearing on the /categories page while still allowing topics to show up in the latest section. sam suggests using CSS to target the elements, but notes that it’s a bit hacky.
Other users, including Salvino and JackALaing, report issues with hiding or showing muted categories. RBoy asks if it’s possible to show muted categories just like regular categories in the category list.
Some users have found workarounds, such as using tags instead of categories. codinghorror suggests using tags, which are more flexible. Salvino plans to use tags to manage 8000 cities, and sam assures him that 20,000 tags will work fine.
digitaldominica reports an issue with the component not hiding categories on Discourse version 3.2.0.beta4-dev, but finds a solution by applying the CSS to the custom-category-boxes from the Minimal Category Boxes theme component.
