Just following up on this in light of the recent post in Group owners should not necessarily be group members — both discussions reflect a growing need for more granular visibility controls that aren’t easily handled by muting, membership, or nesting alone.
The discourse-categories-suppressed plugin is already a huge help when you want to remove a category from Latest, New, and Unread without hiding it entirely from users. Some key use cases:
- Staff inboxes (not secret, but shouldn’t distract from active discussions)
- Opt-in communities that shouldn’t dominate the front page
- Archives that should be visible but not promoted
To build on that, I’d suggest:
Adding this to the plugin directory with a proper topic + setup guide- Folding it into core UI via admin UI settings, with options like:
- “Suppress from Latest/New/Unread”
- “Suppress from search results” ← the plugin deosn’t already support this, but a UI checkbox would make it accessible
- (Already implemented): suppressed categories appear in a “Muted Categories” dropdown at the bottom of the
/categoriespage
These small improvements would let admins fine-tune discoverability and user experience. I’d be happy to contribute test cases or help document use patterns if this gains traction.