Possible to disable topics at top-level category view?

Development

AI-generated summary

A user, vanclute, is seeking a way to disable viewing topics in a top-level category view on their Discourse forum. awesomerobot suggests using a theme with CSS to hide the topic list, targeting specific categories, and pairing it with the category setting “Show subcategory list above topics in this category”. Alternatively, vanclute finds that simply showing subcategories above topics using the built-in setting may be sufficient, making the CSS approach a viable backup option.

1

Tried to search for this but as is so often the case, keywords are too broad.

We have a fairly structured forum we’re implementing with Discourse. It has 6 top level categories, with from 0 to 20 sub-categories in each. The trouble is that if a user simply clicks on the title of the category, they see ALL posts in all sub-categories, and I would prefer that they see only the sub-categories (I’ve disabled posting topics in the categories themselves).

Is there a way to disable seeing topics in a category view?

2

There’s no setting for this, but you could hide the topic list in a theme using CSS. You’d want to target the specific category, for example a category named support:

body.category-support {
  #list-area {
    display: none;
  }
}

That paired with the category setting Show subcategory list above topics in this category should get what you’re looking for, if I’m understanding correctly.

3

Aha… I actually didn’t even know about the show subcategory list options. Discourse has SO many settings it’s quite overwhelming. I think just putting the subcats above, will probably be good enough. But the CSS approach seems reasonable if we decide we really need to go that route. Thanks!