Create one link to multiple categories?

I use Discourse for a unique purpose. My forum is an in-world exploration of my publishing company’s narrative universe. My readers use it to pretend the events and characters in the books are real.

I have four categories that are an archive of a recent year-long interactive narrative that was turned into a book of its own. I don’t want to keep them on the front page, but I do want a link to them available on my header menu, for new readers to be able to explore.

Is there a way to create a link that leads to a view of four categories, instead of one?
I would boil all four categories into one, but because of the unique nature of the experience and how much content there was to sift through, some of these categories already have the maximum amount of nested subcategories and can’t be added to another category.

Help?

Mmm :thinking:

I think you have 2 options:

  1. Use tags instead categories
  2. Go to #marketplace and hire some guru to develop a new plugin for that purpose.
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Like the fact idea, Could they just be subcategories of a single category?

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As @pfaffman says, move the categories under an umbrella category. I suggest some category called Archive that has restricted access.

When you view the archive category you get all the topics of the child categories.

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That would be perfect, unfortunately, the categories I want to archive already have extensive subcategories to organize the narrative and involved puzzles.

Discourse only allows one tier of subcategory, which would normally make sense, but doesn’t work for my community and forum use.

Unless I tag every post, of which there are hundreds, the plugin route might be the way to go.

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It’s not too hard to tag all the topics in a category.

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Thanks for all your suggestions.

I can’t subcategory the categories because Discourse only allows one level of categorization and the cats already have subs.

I have tried tagging but the result isn’t organized by cat/subcat and I have thousands of posts. There is a narrative flow to the archived story and want people to be able to navigate it as easily as possible.

I’ve also posted in marketplace if anyone is interested.