As a new creator of a discourse forum I want to recreate the topic structure I had in a forum I ran between 2004 and 2014 on a now obsolete base. It used an indefinite number of levels of subtopics. Yesterday, casually browsing through some part of (I think) Discourse Meta I noted a message about ho…

You can have a hierarchy of categories, but AFAIK not a hierarchy within a topic (other than replies to messages).

Discourse has categories and sub categories; it does not support an indefinite level of sub-categories. You can approximate more levels with tags. There is no such thing as a sub-topic.

That’s a real downer! How could tags be used to make it look to the casual user that there were subtopics. For example, I would like to have someone go to Science/PCT_Science/Individual/Conscious_Perception/Reorganization/Function_building and a few dozen such locations, most of them having been ini…

If you need that many levels of categorisation you’ll have to choose another forum software. But although you may want your users to have to go through six levels, I doubt many of them actually do.

Either choose some other platform or back up to describe the problem rather than your perceived solution.

Good advice. Since Discourse is obviously popular and topics are many, there must be another way to group related topics into tree-like networks. The reason for choosing Discourse after a search was its integration with e-mail. I also run a mailing list on the same range of topics, and I want the us…

[image] MartinT: I want the users to be able to choose freely between the mailing list and the forum when contributing to a topic. When a user gets an email, there’s a choice at the end of it to reply by email or to go directly to that specific post on the forum. Does that help?

Yes, that possibility is a major reason I decided to try Discourse.

It’s hard to imagine that your users really want or need that level of granularity, never mind being able to comply with it. Users can watch tags, however, so you could have some reasonable set of category/sub-categories and let people use tags for other stuff, but I don’t think you can create a t…

It’s not what the users want, but what in the earlier forum they evolved to use, unchaperoned. Very few, as I remember, went that far, but they could have done, any time one of them wanted to. I will have to look into the use of tags. I’m just at the start of trying to learn how to get Discourse to…

How do I create a sub-topic and a sub-sub-topic?

Support

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) April 7, 2023, 2:12pm 16

It’s now possible to create sub-sub-categories. Can we increase the sub-category dept level? - #3 by pfaffman

Topic		Replies	Views
Sub-sub-sub-sub-sub categories Feature	30	6658	December 4, 2025
Sub-Subcategories? Support	5	568	November 4, 2024
Subforum structure Support	3	670	October 23, 2022
Creating a Mega Forum Self-hosting	4	1708	May 14, 2016
Hacking discourse to create sub-sub categories Development	7	2115	May 27, 2017

How do I create a sub-topic and a sub-sub-topic?

Related topics