Hi everyone,
I’m looking for a way to improve the user experience on sites that use Discourse as a high-volume comment system while trying to maintain an active, independent community.
The Setup: We have a parent category (“Tecnoblog”) with several subcategories (“News”, “Reviews”, etc.). All automated topics from our website go into these subcategories.
The Problem: To prevent the “Latest” global feed from being overwhelmed by dozens of daily automated news topics, we want to Mute these subcategories by default, so topics created by users have a chance to receive views and replies.
At the same time, users want to have a place where they can see the posts that are receiving more comments, so they can engaje in the discussion as well. This place should be the category Tecnoblog.
However, this creates a navigation bottleneck:
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When a user visits the Parent Category (Tecnoblog), it appears empty or outdated because it respects the “Mute” setting of its children. It shows only topics with which the user has already engaged.
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Users who want to see the latest discussions about our articles have to manually click into each subcategory (News, then Reviews, then Columns) to see what’s new. There is no “centralized hub” for these specific topics anymore.
Proposed Solution / Feature Request: I would like to propose a setting (perhaps at the Parent Category level) to “Ignore Subcategory Mute state in Parent View.”. Or maybe, just completely ignore the “mute” state when the user is in the category view.
This would allow:
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Global Feed (Home/Latest): Clean and focused on community-made topics (since subcategories are muted) and topics that the users has already engaged.
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Parent Category View: A “centralized” feed showing everything happening in its subcategories, regardless of their mute status.
Has anyone found a workaround for this, or is this logic something that could be implemented in core?