Hiding Suggested Topics?

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Hiding Suggested Topics

The discussion revolves around hiding Suggested Topics at the bottom of conversations in Discourse. GarrettLisi finds them confusing and distracting, while codinghorror explains their purpose and benefits, such as providing a “pot of gold” at the end of reading a topic and prioritizing topics users have participated in. However, codinghorror also offers a solution by hiding the <div id="suggested-topics"> element using CSS or setting the number of suggested topics to 0 in the site settings. GarrettLisi confirms that setting the number to 0 hides Suggested Topics completely. Additionally, BabylonZeus shares a CSS styling solution to make Suggested Topics more distinguishable, and JammyDodger reiterates that setting the suggested topics admin setting to 0 removes Suggested Topics from the bottom of a topic.

1

We’re finding that having Suggested Topics below every conversation is confusing and distracting. Is there an easy way to hide that? Or, if not, is there a hard way? Thanks!

2

That’s an odd reaction, as they are a central design point of Discourse, for a variety of reasons:

  1. The “pot of gold” at the end of reading a topic is… more interesting things to read

  2. Suggested prioritizes topics you’ve participated in/created/watched, so it’s a fast way to clear your read queue without pogo-sticking back and forth to the topic lists.

  3. Suggested gives you a related walk in non-closed topics in the same category you’re currently in. I frequently find things in suggested that I wanted to follow up on eventually anyway.

So I’d suggest you might want to try absorbing the Discourse style a bit longer before jumping to extremes. Losing #2 in particular would be really painful for me as a user on your Discourse, if I’m actually reading stuff at all.

That said, if you want to remove, CSS is probably the way:

<div id="suggested-topics">

Just set that element to hidden in CSS, and you can probably set the # of suggested topics returned from the default of 5 to 1 in the site settings to reduce server load a tad.

4 Likes
3

Ah, thank you Jeff, that does sound like that may be the way to go once our discourse is more populated.

And thanks for the tip about the # in the settings – setting it to 0 hid Suggested Topics completely. For now.

2 Likes
4

Even if this topic is old, I came upon the same need.
Regarding the answer of Jeff Atwood, I told myself that the functionnality could be useful, but the default display was really confusing.
I solved my confusion my playing with css styling.

If someone has the same reaction, this helped me to have a clear vision of what’s happening on the page :

suggested-topics {
border-top: solid;
border-color: #86a7db;
background-color: #dae3e8;
}
.topic-post {
border: solid;
border-color: #c8d5db;
background-color: #e6f0f5;
}

1 Like
5

To remove the Suggested Topics from the bottom of a topic you can set the suggested topics admin setting to 0. :+1: