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.
AI-generated summary
Hide topic from selected categories on main page
The discussion revolves around the idea of hiding certain categories from the main page of a forum. Shrike suggests that this feature would be useful for large forums, allowing users to see what’s going on without being overwhelmed by categories they’re not interested in.
David suggests an alternative solution, such as muting categories or using customizable filters, and points to a relevant discussion on topic list tabs for user customizable saved filters.
Pfaffman proposes using groups that users can self-join, where categories are restricted to group members, as another way to deal with multiple categories. However, this approach has the downside of limiting access to anonymous users.
Shrike notes that this approach may require educating users, which can be undesirable. Andy02 counters that the learning curve is small, and users can quickly understand how the site works by experimenting with the features.
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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.