That’s the change I thought we were going to make. The way it is now is wildly inconsistent in muted topics vs muted categories.
I made that copy update, but we really need to confirm that muting a topic will hide it from latest as well.
I created a new category called ‘Canned Responses’ that has about 20 topics in it. We use this category for our ‘Discourse Templates’ so I don’t want them showing up in my Latest feed.
I went and added the category to the ‘default muted’ list and it asked if I should update for existing topics and I said yes.
They still showed up in my latest list. My best guess is that because I’m the author of all those topics that it excluded me from the muting, but I don’t want to see them as they’re just templates.
I used bulk update to mute them all but now they’re missing from both latest AND the category list.
It appears to only be an issue for me. I logged in as another user that has permissions to see the Canned Responses category and they are able to see them in the category but don’t see them under latest.
Is there a setting that will hide them from latest, but not hide them in the category for author? As other users start adding topics to the category I’m guessing they will show up in their latest feed too.
And finally, it appears that the text is inconsistent with what happens.
It says it will be hidden in latest, but does not say it will be hidden in the category as well.
There are some peculiarities between topic level notifications and category level notifications. The first one is as you’ve found out, the topic level notifications take precedence. So if you have a topic set to Watching and mute the category then that Watched topic will still stay as Watched (and act as such). And you’re right, any topic you create is automatically set as Watching, so muting a category won’t clear your own topics away from Latest unless you manually change the topic level notification.
The second is the difference between a mute at the topic level and a mute at the category level. The topic level one is slightly more aggressive. 
I think what you want to do for your template category topics is to go to your canned-responses category and look at all of your muted topics (by adding ?state=muted to the category url eg. https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature/2?state=muted) and then use the bulk actions again to select all the muted template topics and set them to ‘normal’. And if you still have your canned-responses category set to muted at the category level they should now be absent from /latest but still show in the canned-responses category.
You can see an example of it here in Site feedback > Forum summaries, where the category is default muted to hide the topics from /latest, but they’re still findable in the category itself.
Does that make sense?
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Yes, swapping them back to normal seems to have fixed it.
Is there a way to make topics you create in a muted category set to Normal rather than Watched by default?
If not, I’ll just write up some internal documentation so nobody else gets frustrated.
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No, I don’t think there is anything that can do that currently. Though having the template topics show up as normal is no bad thing. I’ve found it useful to see when anyone posts to them with suggestions for changes, for instance. Or being able to see when someone creates a new one. If no one posts then they’ll drift down the stack of /latest as normal and are generally no bother.
I agree. Normal is what we want.
If the category is set to muted, but you set your topic to normal after creating it, then you get notified if you’re replied to or @mentioned, but it also doesn’t show up in /latest.
Ah, I think there’s been some confusion. I wasn’t referring to the notification level ‘normal’. I meant that the template topics appearing in the /latest (et al) topic lists was no bad thing.
Ah, well I respectfully disagree. When I have to go in and write 20 or more at a time they overwhelm my /latest, and they’re only available to support staff so nobody else ever needs to see them in /latest either.
I just wrote a staff doc that states when you create a new canned response the final step is to set notification level to Normal.
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No worries. The option is there to hide them, and you can always flick the category back to ‘normal’ if you ever change your mind, so it’s very much a player’s choice scenario.
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