I’m also having this issue where I want to turn a private message into a topic in a private category, without wanting to trigger notifications / listing in Latest / sending emails.
I found that this workflow works for me:
- Unlist private message first
- Make Public Topic
- Re-categorize the topic
- Re-list the topic
- Delete admin messages
This will not trigger notifications or emails. It would be nice if you could pick a category when choosing Make Public Topic though – when I used this option, it went into a seemingly random category that I did not expect it to go to on our instance (since we have uncategorized disabled).