The discussion revolves around creating unlisted topics in Discourse. jqnatividad inquired about specifying a topic as unlisted upon creation, to avoid sending notifications to category subscribers.
jomaxro suggested creating a topic in the Staff category, making it unlisted, and then moving it to the target category as a workaround. This approach was tested and confirmed to work by jqnatividad. However, erlend_sh pointed out that adding extra options for niche actions might not be necessary if simple workarounds exist.
Additionally, jqnatividad requested documentation on best practices for different Discourse personas, which jomaxro partially addressed by sharing a link to a meta discussion on user states.
balthatrix sought an automated way to create unlisted topics using the Discourse ruby gem, but found that the relevant argument is not documented.
Is there a way to specify that a topic should be unlisted on creation?
Otherwise, if somebody subscribes to a category, they get a notification, even if I quickly unlist a topic after creation.
If not, what’s a workaround? Create a topic in Staff, make it unlisted, then move it to the target category?
I am pretty sure that would work, but I really like this idea as an option for staff. Could be as simple as a checkbox in the topic editor. If we are adding a checkbox, the option to create a Closed topic would be great as well.
Have you tested to see if your workaround does the trick? That’s expected behaviour so if that doesn’t work then this might get some priority.
Personally I’m not in favour of adding extra options for niche actions when simple enough workarounds exist.
The workaround works!
And I agree with @erlend_sh that it should just be adopted as a best practice. However, admins/staff should be warned about the “unlisting” notification gotcha. It should be documented somewhere…
BTW, apart from meta and the docs at discourse/docs at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub, is there a Best Practices Guide for the different Discourse personas? (Admin, Moderator, Casual User, Email User, etc.)
You mean this?
Hi,
I’m interested in doing this via the discourse ruby gem (preferably) or some other automated way.
I can’t figure out the right argument to pass into the DiscourseClient#create_topic though, and it doesn’t appear to be in the documentation as a parameter in a plain curl call, or in the discourse-rails docs… I’ve also tried a few guesses like visible:false and unlisted:true Can anyone point me in the right direction or tell me it’s not a feature?