I’ve looked through and found a few features and other topics here about excluding a category from search results, but haven’t found anything more recent than maybe 2019.
Here’s what I’m trying to solve for: We’ve got a bunch of technical categories that include questions and answers that are support-oriented. We also have an open chat section, where we have long, winding threads that sometimes touch on technical topics (so they surface through search as “relevant”), but the nature of the discussion is “just chatting”, and the content isn’t really reviewed for technical accuracy.
New users to the forum often search, find a long, meandering discussion that has something that looks like their problem, and they see the number of responses in the thread and think “these folks know what they’re talking about”, and they use that advice, sometimes with less than ideal results.
We’re trying to figure out a way to not curb the open discussions, but also not to hamper those who are trying to find answers to specific questions. Preventing search from showing results in that category seems like a good option, but it doesn’t seem to be configurable. (It also seems that you can’t search with “-#open-chat” to exclude those results, but that’s probably a separate issue).
One idea is that our open chat category not be available to TL0 and TL1 users. There’s a certain appeal to that (limiting trolls’ ability to just ‘opinion-bomb’ until they’ve achieved a certain trust level seems like a good idea), but ultimately, we’d like even trusted users to not have to wade through search results that come up from that category to find the real answers they’re looking for.
What options are there to achieve our goal here?