That seems like a great solution! And “all” didn’t need to show up until you have muted categories or tags.
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This is a critically important for my community right now. We have a… very large number of subcategories for a particular category. (Hundreds.) They’re all local communities, so individual categories are irrelevant for the vast majority of users but are of vital importance to those who need them. They’re the cornerstone of our community in many ways. It’s an interesting structure. On our previous software they were “opt in” so they were never displayed unless you specifically subscribed to them. With Discourse, we have to force an opt-out on them and then they have to go hunting for their particular subcategory to unmute it.
I have them all auto-muted by default but that doesn’t do a damn bit of good for people who joined before I did so. (And yes, I entered them one at a time.)
As a side note, it’s also causing some traffic stress on the entire installation itself. We don’t have a better solution for it right now. Discourse wasn’t designed for the number of muted categories we need right now. I’m not sure if the slowness we’re seeing is caused by that entirely, the sudden influx of new users, or a combination of the two. That’s a different issue.
Anyway, all of that to say yes, PLEASE I need to be able to mute categories for a bunch of people.
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Why make them all public, then? Why not have group permissions on them from the get-go then add people to the relevant groups?
Also is this being done speculatively? That is, create a thousand subcategories assuming they will all eventually be active… even when the reality is that only a handful will ever have meaningful participation levels?
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That’s a definite possibility for the future. Would it handle that many groups better than the the way we have it set up? I know we broke the About page when we added the managers of these groups to them as moderators. I can discuss this with fellow staff to see if that might be a more viable solution.
Nope. Most of these regions are years old and have substantial participation rates. We create them as locals volunteer to manage them. While no doubt some have fallen more inactive over the last decade or so, the vast majority are quite active. Memberships for regional subcategories can range anywhere from a dozen or so people to thousands. We have areas for these on the main half of the site but we don’t have the forum side linked yet.
It’s a weirdly structured thing. 
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I’m not sure that was an answer to my post, but I guess so. If I understood correctly, “ignore” is to not show the posts of the ignored user, even if you read a topic where he posted, whereas “mute” is only to not show notifications and not have the topic appear on the front page when there is a new post from that user (but still be able to read posts when you read the topic). Or did I get that wrong ? If not, my interest is indeed about muting, not ignoring.
@Heather_Dudley Your situation is similar to what I want to do (previous post) on some level. But your problem is about subcategories, mine is about posts from a specific user. Your solution is pretty interesting. I could use that by creating a different user for each topic, then I would be able to do like you, but with the slowing down things you’re mentioning I guess.
In your case, if you mute the whole category, and people start tracking a subcategory in it, wouldn’t that work ? (that was the “priority” thing I was asking about when muting and tracking at the same time)
The solution CodingHorror is proposing seems to have one flaw for you: This would be good for actual users, but wouldn’t it prevent people not part of the group from viewing the topic (visitors, and especially potential new users wanting to join such a group) ? I mean, it’s usually because you had the chance to read that you then want to join …
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You could ask some of the sites that use groups instead of muting categories, as discussed here:
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There may be an easy solution you may want to look into (what I am also going to do for me): Hide what you want to with a theme (using CSS). This would remove everything you don’t want from the front page but wouldn’t affect the “unread” page of all users who track one or some of the categories.
If what I mentioned earlier doesn’t work (I would be interested to know btw):
One guy did some interesting stuff on that front, probably worth some digging (his problem isn’t with subcategories or a user like you or me, but with groups. In the end it’s also quite the same base problem):
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