Hiding Suggested Topics?

We’re finding that having Suggested Topics below every conversation is confusing and distracting. Is there an easy way to hide that? Or, if not, is there a hard way? Thanks!

That’s an odd reaction, as they are a central design point of Discourse, for a variety of reasons:

  1. The “pot of gold” at the end of reading a topic is… more interesting things to read

  2. Suggested prioritizes topics you’ve participated in/created/watched, so it’s a fast way to clear your read queue without pogo-sticking back and forth to the topic lists.

  3. Suggested gives you a related walk in non-closed topics in the same category you’re currently in. I frequently find things in suggested that I wanted to follow up on eventually anyway.

So I’d suggest you might want to try absorbing the Discourse style a bit longer before jumping to extremes. Losing #2 in particular would be really painful for me as a user on your Discourse, if I’m actually reading stuff at all.

That said, if you want to remove, CSS is probably the way:

<div id="suggested-topics">

Just set that element to hidden in CSS, and you can probably set the # of suggested topics returned from the default of 5 to 1 in the site settings to reduce server load a tad.

4 Likes

Ah, thank you Jeff, that does sound like that may be the way to go once our discourse is more populated.

And thanks for the tip about the # in the settings – setting it to 0 hid Suggested Topics completely. For now.

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Even if this topic is old, I came upon the same need.
Regarding the answer of Jeff Atwood, I told myself that the functionnality could be useful, but the default display was really confusing.
I solved my confusion my playing with css styling.

If someone has the same reaction, this helped me to have a clear vision of what’s happening on the page :

suggested-topics {
border-top: solid;
border-color: #86a7db;
background-color: #dae3e8;
}
.topic-post {
border: solid;
border-color: #c8d5db;
background-color: #e6f0f5;
}

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To remove the Suggested Topics from the bottom of a topic you can set the suggested topics admin setting to 0. :+1: