Filter view for muted categories

I would like to have a category-level filter view that works the way topics do. We have a significant amount of categories. For site performance, we need to have most of them muted with the mute all categories by default option. The problem is now that we don’t have a good way to find the forums. Many are specialized. Having a non-muted view would improve discoverability. The problem now is the way muting works the subcategories are hidden from the main page, and all category descriptions are hidden.

As an example, you can view all topics you’ve muted through /latest/?state=muted

It would be great if a user could access a list of muted categories the same way, perhaps something like /categories/?state=muted.

Ideally, we could have an option for it to be added to top menu in the settings as well. But I’d settle for a link I could include in an announcement post in the unmuted watched-first announcements forum.

Unmuted:

Mute all:

As you can see from the above screenshot, there is no way to know there are subcategories at all. An alternative of course is to create a manual index, but that’s… a pretty inefficient way to do this. :slight_smile: Outside of the regional categories we have roughly 70 or so? Something like that. I really, really don’t want to manually write that list for an index.

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If you don’t have a lot of new category churn wouldn’t this be the perfect use case for a published page?

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I certainly support adding some ninja query params to work around this issue for now. There are still issues with discoverability, but at least you will have some workable workflow. Adding a link to top menu is trivial in a component btw

@vinothkannans how complicated is it to add support for ?state=muted to /categories ?

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It’s easy in server side. But it may require some changes in the page’s js part. Anyway, it won’t be a tough one.

Also, what about a accordion element in bottom of the normal categories (like below) which will fetch and show the muted categories asynchronously? In this case we don’t need much changes in the JS part too.

image

P.S. I think a linkable page like categories?status=muted is still required for @Heather_Dudley’s need.

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I think that is an excellent proposal @vinothkannans! Having an expandable muted category panel at the bottom of the category list would be fantastic.

(We should probably do something similar for tags? :thinking:)

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PR is ready for review

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/10303

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This is now merged to the core.

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