# Muting categories hides them. Muting subcategories should too
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [October 17, 2019, 10:51pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316 "2019-10-17T22:51:00Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Heather\_Dudley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Heather_Dudley)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2019, 10:51pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316/1 "2019-10-17T22:51:01Z")
If I mute a category, it (appropriately) hides it from the Categories list. I like this behavior (as do my users) because it lets users opt-out of uninteresting discussions.
How-to muted
However, muting _sub_categories does not behave the same way.
Here, I have sysadmins and devs muted because I am neither, and all that jargon is alien to me.
Subcategories should behave the same way as categories do; disappear from the categories page when muted.
With a lot of users like ours, with very intense but varied interests, they have expressed a lot of desire to hide categories they aren’t interested in to make navigating the Categories page easier and less cluttered.
I also support the expected behavior of muting/watching a category muting/watching its subcategories unless specifically unmuted. See here and here.
> [@Mute category to mute all children categories](https://meta.discourse.org/t/mute-category-to-mute-all-children-categories/15098):
>
> I think this is more logical. In case, we want to exclude a specific child category, just insert it to watch. What do you guys think about this ?
> [@Can watching a category watch all its subcategories as well?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-watching-a-category-watch-all-its-subcategories-as-well/69306/2):
>
> This question is similar to: in [https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-get-notification-of-all-new-topics-of-a-category/4496](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-get-notification-of-all-new-topics-of-a-category/4496) but it doesn’t seem to have a resolution yet. Subcategories seem to be only used for: Organization purposes Getting list of Latest
---
### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2019, 1:28am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316/2 "2019-10-21T01:28:15Z")
> [@Heather\_Dudley](#):
>
> Here, I have sysadmins and devs muted because I am neither, and all that jargon is alien to me.
This to me looks like a bug in “mute” we should be suppressing these categories on that screenshot.
@kris.kotlarek can you investigate a fix here?
---
### Author:  [@Heather\_Dudley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Heather_Dudley)
#### Post date: [October 31, 2019, 1:36am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316/7 "2019-10-31T01:36:05Z")
Quick update! This is working great on desktop, but the fix didn’t seem to apply to mobile. Report from user:
> Unfortunately, subcategory muting still shows _all_ the subcategories on mobile view. Or at least it still does for me on my android phone in Chrome and Firefox mobile.
>
> 
>
> Here’s my view of the genres category on desktop – as you can see, I’ve muted all the subcategories except for fantasy.
>
> 
>
> But all the subcategories I’ve muted still show for me on my mobile phone. :c
> So unmuting the ‘regions’ category to show only my home region on the main forums page (while manually muting all other region subcategories) doesn’t work on mobile, which is where I spend about half my time on the site.
---
### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [October 31, 2019, 2:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316/8 "2019-10-31T02:16:56Z")
Thanks for testing! @kris.kotlarek will get this sorted
---
### Author:  [@Heather\_Dudley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Heather_Dudley)
#### Post date: [October 31, 2019, 2:33am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316/9 "2019-10-31T02:33:32Z")
The joys of a robust user base. They find issues _fast_.
---
### Author:  [@kris.kotlarek](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kris.kotlarek)
#### Post date: [November 6, 2019, 11:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316/11 "2019-11-06T23:37:08Z")
Hey Heather,
Thank you for telling us about that bug, it is fixed. NaNoWriMo is deployed to the latest version so mobile users should not see hidden categories anymore 🙂
---
### Author:  [@Heather\_Dudley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Heather_Dudley)
#### Post date: [November 6, 2019, 11:50pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316/12 "2019-11-06T23:50:16Z")
Excellent, thank you SO much for _both_ fixes!
---
### Author:  [@kris.kotlarek](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kris.kotlarek)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2021, 4:10am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/muting-categories-hides-them-muting-subcategories-should-too/131316/13 "2021-02-11T04:10:29Z")