I checked all user settings but I didn’t find an ability to hide some categories from main page. It seems it’d be very useful for large forums. Indeed a user can limit topics by a category. But main page is also useful to see what is going on on the forum (that’s because it’s main page 
). We can easily imagine a situation when a user isn’t interesting in some set of categories and would like to hide them. Not completely (they still should be visible on /category page) but hide topic from that categories on the main page.
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If all you want to do is hide a category from ‘latest’, then why not just mute it?
An alternative solution could be the feature being discussed here:
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Exactly! Thanks, I’ll post my thoughts there .
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Another way to deal with lots of categories people don’t care about is to use groups that people can self-join.
Imagine a car site with groups for all of the manufacturers. All of the manufacturer categories allow reading only by those in the manufacturer group. The only way to see the Ford categories is by joining the Ford group.
This seems like a great solution to the program you describe. The downside of this approach is that anon users can’t see the messages. I don’t see a way to add anonymous to a group.
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Interesting idea, thanks.
But it’d require additional educating of users which is sometimes undesirable… (users won’t see anything till they join a group)
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I think users won’t understand the balloons, but the obvious thing to do is click one and see what happens. Once they’ve done that once they should understand how the site works, making it a very small learning curve.