# Muted categories in composer?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/muted-categories-in-composer/257083
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [March 4, 2023, 9:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muted-categories-in-composer/257083 "2023-03-04T21:29:27Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@mattdm](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mattdm)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2023, 9:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muted-categories-in-composer/257083/1 "2023-03-04T21:29:27Z")
Is it expected / correct that muted categories show up in the drop-down in the new topic composer?
I would like to make those out-of-sight-out-of-mind for new users to reduce complexity.
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### Author:  [@awesomerobot](https://meta.discourse.org/u/awesomerobot)
#### Post date: [March 6, 2023, 10:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muted-categories-in-composer/257083/2 "2023-03-06T22:18:27Z")
Yes, this is expected — muting a category will disable notifications from the category and hide it from /categories and /latest; everything else is left unchanged.
The category could be hidden from a group with a theme (which I could walk through if you’d prefer!), but it would be easier to restrict category permissions in the category’s settings:
This would prevent TL0 users from creating a topic in the category, which also prevents it from showing up in their composer. If they come upon the category or a topic within despite it being muted, they’d still be able to add replies — but would be prevented from creating a new topic. Would this be too restrictive in your case?
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### Author:  [@mattdm](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mattdm)
#### Post date: [March 6, 2023, 11:06pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muted-categories-in-composer/257083/3 "2023-03-06T23:06:53Z")
> [@awesomerobot](#):
>
> Would this be too restrictive in your case?
I don’t think it is functionally too restrictive, but I feel like it has three problems — one which probably generalizes to other sites, another which is kind of specific to my situation, and third which I also think generalizes.
The first is simply that it’s _additional_ confusion — new users need to learn about trust levels and permissions at some point, but now they might need to learn about it earlier, which goes against my goal of a more simple experience. In some cases, [Feature request: "redirect" "New Topic" button to a valid category when user doesn't have permission to post somewhere](https://meta.discourse.org/t/feature-request-redirect-new-topic-button-to-a-valid-category-when-user-doesnt-have-permission-to-post-somewhere/252909) might help.
The second is that while Discourse is (relatively) new to our community, the community itself goes back 20 years. I had some early frustration with people trying the site in good faith, and then getting really annoyed at the restrictions on links and images. I therefore intend (once we have our group sync thing working) to bump most new-to-discourse-not-new-to-Fedora people to t1 immediately. This would make it _possible_ to restrict some of the groups meant for more-involved contributors, but then ironically leaves us back to the beginning — people new to the site have more choices than necessary.
Third, _as an admin who can post anywhere_, I’d like to reduce my own cognitive load when selecting a group. I can easily see this being the case for many TL3+ users and mods … or even TL2 users. Unlocking capabilities and complexities as users are more familiar is a great general design pattern… but for some things, advanced users benefit from simplicity as well.