# Hide topic from selected categories on main page
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-topic-from-selected-categories-on-main-page/60608
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [April 7, 2017, 4:23pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-topic-from-selected-categories-on-main-page/60608 "2017-04-07T16:23:42Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Shrike](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Shrike)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2017, 4:23pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-topic-from-selected-categories-on-main-page/60608/1 "2017-04-07T16:23:42Z")
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.
---
### Author:  [@david](https://meta.discourse.org/u/david)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2017, 4:34pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-topic-from-selected-categories-on-main-page/60608/2 "2017-04-07T16:34:54Z")
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:
> [@Topic list tabs for user-customizeable saved filters](https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-list-tabs-for-user-customizeable-saved-filters/40953):
>
> On some forums with a large variety of content, users will be most interested in topics that fall into a subset of the categories or tags available. When this becomes the rule, rather than the exception, forum admins can configure the home page to be the category listing rather than the /latest page. But then users must choose which door to go down - and they may be interested in seeing a listing from multiple categories at once. A few topics have been posted about this in the past: [Specia…](https://meta.discourse.org/t/specialized-timeline/40840)
---
### Author:  [@Shrike](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Shrike)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2017, 4:41pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-topic-from-selected-categories-on-main-page/60608/3 "2017-04-07T16:41:26Z")
Exactly! Thanks, I’ll post my thoughts there .
---
### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2017, 6:11pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-topic-from-selected-categories-on-main-page/60608/4 "2017-04-07T18:11:27Z")
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.
---
### Author:  [@Shrike](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Shrike)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2017, 6:14pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-topic-from-selected-categories-on-main-page/60608/5 "2017-04-07T18:14:49Z")
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)
---
### Author:  [@Andy02](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andy02)
#### Post date: [October 30, 2018, 10:11pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-topic-from-selected-categories-on-main-page/60608/6 "2018-10-30T22:11:25Z")
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.