# Author-only Topic (take 2)

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/author-only-topic-take-2/303254
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [April 10, 2024, 4:06pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/author-only-topic-take-2/303254 "2024-04-10T16:06:14Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 6

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### Author: ![jericson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/jericson/32/116215_2.png) [@jericson](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jericson)
#### Post date: [April 10, 2024, 4:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/author-only-topic-take-2/303254/6 "2024-04-10T16:58:28Z")

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This seems like a good, lightweight option. It’s in an early draft stage, but I’m working on [a theme component](https://github.com/jericson/discourse-clean-published-pages/tree/main) that will let me add the “published” tag to a topic in order to strip away all the user interface widgets I don’t want people to see.\[1\] I got the idea from this post:

> [@Page Publishing](https://meta.discourse.org/t/page-publishing/151971/145):
>
> An alternative to Page Publishing - another method is to use CSS to remove the unwanted elements on a regular Topic Post, while preserving all of the functionality (i.e. Javascripts in installed Theme Components, and CSS styling, etc.) Tags in the composer can be used to selectively apply formatting to a specific Topic Post. For example, on my site I achieve this by pasting the following CSS into my theme’s CSS in the Common tab: /\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* REMOVE THINGS FROM LAYOUT USING TAGS \*\*…

It shouldn’t be hard to disable the reply button based on a tag or category.

* * *

1. It’s part of a project to replace a company’s static pages with Discourse. Surprisingly, the Discourse version [performs better on the PageSpeed Insights metrics](https://beta.buildcivitas.com/t/discourse-performance/122)!

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