I muted two categories and it still appear on top of the categories page (since it have recent activity). Shouldn’t it be hidden or at the bottom? It’s more annoying when I use categories as home page. And “categories with featured topics” option even showing me muted category’s topics too. Also is it better to order categories by notification_level and then activity.
Yes we should fix this in some manner cc @sam.
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May I create PR to exclude muted categories from categories.json?
Of course, but don’t “exclude” them, mark then as “muted” instead.
In categories.json it already have notification_level=0 property. If we excluded it will not display in all categories listing locations (like categories page, composer dropdown, filter dropdown, etc.,). Or we have to manually hide it or order it to the bottom position in all locations.
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You can’t remove categories from categories.json, otherwise they’ll never appear anywhere if you mute them.
I would start with ensuring we respect the notification_level=0 for the /categories page first.
Then I would deal with the dropdowns and such.
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I thought it shouldn’t appear anywhere except user’s preferences page setting muted categories. If it will affect site’s functionality let’s do manually.
“categories.json” is the source of truth for categories. So if you remove them, they’ll never appear anywhere 
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Please can you fix it, we’ve have a business plan with this behavior since February 2020
This is by design, if you wish to suppress them on the categories pleas use a theme component.
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You can use this theme component to suppress the categories.
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This is no more the case at the moment.
Muted categories now are grouped and hidden in a box at the bottom of the category page. Do you guys know a way to go back to the old behavior where muted categories are still listed in the category page?
Thank you!
Why would you want the old behavior? The new behavior is a better general default.
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Hello @codinghorror, I would need to find a way to get the old behavior because our working group needs to be able to get the whole category list and not just the not-muted categories. They also would not realize that the muted categories are hidden at the bottom of the page.
In the past there was a way to achieve a similar result of the new behavior ( one could use this plugin to hide their muted topics from the latest topics page and this css plugin to hide all the muted categories from the categories page, now I just can’t find a way to achieve the old behavior like I’ve tried to explain here.
Do you have any suggestion? Thank you!
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I agree to needing the whole category list. We mute every category by default in order for the topics not to overwhelm people, but we want the categories to be discover able so that people can peek in and see if they’d like to participate in that particular work. Kind of like how Slack has channels that you don’t see if you’re not in them but when you go to add new channels you see all the options and can peruse what’s in any one channel in order to decide whether or not to join it.
In that case, already it’s displaying all the categories to the end-user like in the below screenshot.
After following a category user’s categories page view will look like this 
Where they can expand muted categories section anytime.
If you always want the muted categories section in expanded view, you can use the below CSS to achieve it.
.muted-categories .category-list.hidden {
display: table !important;
}
.muted-categories-link .d-icon {
display: none;
}
@mangojumbo you can also use this CSS hack.
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@vinothkannans thank you for your reply and your useful css.
Our problem is that we customized our category page with css so that categories are grouped into separate groups (groups about different projects, different languages, …) and each group have a main title.
When we mute all the categories that our user’s don´t belong to, this categorization is no more valid, since most of the categories go together to the botton.
Wouldn’t it be possible for discourse to offer a setting to bring back the old behavior (show all muted groups in the same positions?) @codinghorror
Thank you very much for what you are doing with this incredible project