The discussion revolves around hiding specific categories or sub-categories from “suggested topics” on a Discourse forum. samuelzeller initially asked how to prevent posts from the “introduce-yourself” sub-category from appearing in suggested topics site-wide. dax provided a CSS solution to visually hide these topics, which samuelzeller found helpful.
However, tonninseteli and jrgong pointed out that this is just a visual hack and not a perfect solution. tonninseteli shared their use case, where they want to exclude “want to buy,” “want to sell,” and “off-topic” categories from suggestions, while promoting on-topic discussions. jrgong also expressed the need for a feature to remove specific categories from showing up in suggested topics completely.
It was suggested to use the site setting “limit suggested to category,” but this setting has limitations and may not achieve the desired outcome. The discussion highlights the need for a more robust solution to control which categories are included in suggested topics.
I’m running a Discourse forum for photographers and I have one category named “intro” with inside a sub-category named “introduce-yourself” where people can post a new topic and say hello. Those are not shown on the “latest” in order not to spam the front page of the forum.
But they still appear in “suggested topics” under other posts. How can I hide them and prevent them from appearing into “suggested topics” site-wide?
Awesome, it worked! Of course it’s just hiding them visually so sometimes when it suggest me only this category then the suggested topic list will look empty but that’s fine. Thanks for helping!
You can set each category to show the suggested topics in all categories or only in that category in which the topic was written. If you get the “introduction” category so that the suggested topics are also from other categories, you will hardly remain without visible suggested topics.
Of course, the change is just a visual hack, if, for some reason, the suggested topics are only in the “introduction” category you will remain without any visible topic, as you said.
We have on-topic categories, and three categories, want to buy, want to sell and off-topic, which I’d like to exclude from suggestions. The on-topic discussions can in my opinion be cross-promoted, while the second hand categories, which are very busy, are explored anyways and usually push other topics off the list.
The off-topic I just want to hide, not because I want to discourage off-topic discussion in any way, but simply to keep attention in the original context.
It’s a good question though is the on-topic categorization too fine grained, and should, for example tags, be used instead, but I’d like to hear some thoughts and best practices on this before making any big changes or restructuring
Digging out this one! In our suggested topics often 2 out of 5 happen to be from offtopic category which we would like to exclude. For now I enabled setting limit suggested to category just to see how users will react.
But it would be great to have a feature to remove specific categories from showing up in suggested topics completely.
!