Best option to have category "hidden" on Discourse, but otherwise accessible if you have the link?

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File sharing sites, video upload sites, they all have a feature where you can have an “unlisted” file/video—the video/file exists, anyone can access it, it’s just not published anywhere.

I am looking to accomplish the same thing with Discourse categories and topics, and here’s why:
We are looking to use the Discourse option of embedding comments in other webpages, especially useful with Discourse auto-generating the topics. We plan to embed comments in all of our documentation pages, so each page can be discussed at the bottom by posting in the comments.

We don’t want this category of topics to show up the Discourse category view, latest topics, etc. though.

Any ideas on the best way to accomplish this with Discourse today?

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You can default mute a category. Then it is suppressed at /latest and only appears in a muted section at /categories

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There is also a theme component to hide them from /categories Hide Muted Categories

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If the topics are unlisted, it won’t matter that the category is visible.

Sounds like what you want is some means to Embed Discourse comments on another website via Javascript but have those topics be unlisted by default.

It might be possible to have the automation plugin do that or perhaps a small plugin automatically unlist topics created in a given category.

Having it default muted might also be all you need.

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I really like this! At first glance this sounds like it may be what I need. I need to see if people would still get notifications for replies and discussions within those topics still, though.

Otherwise, this looks promising!

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I believe that they do still get notifications, it just doesn’t show up in searches.

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image

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As a recent example, I Bert default muted the forum summaries category, and everybody still got lots of notifications for @mentions and linked topics from those… :slight_smile:

We had to jump through a couple of contortions to limit them, so I’m reasonably confident notifications still make it out of a muted category. :slight_smile:

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Oh, so you were the culprit for that! :joy:

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There doesn’t seem to be a Reaction for looks a bit guilty. :slight_smile:

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Time for :jammy: to be born!

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A combination of maybe this theme-component and mute category for all maybe?

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I may be missing the setting, but where do you default mute a category?

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/admin/settings and then search for default categories muted.

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Ah, here I was looking in the category settings.