Hi Discourse Team,
with one of a recent upgrade it seems the category setting
Suppress category from latest topics
Is missing and I can’t find in the release notes, that this was intentional?
Here is the latest information I’ve found from @jomaxro
https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-category-from-latest/86023/4?u=b-iggy
This was a very important setting for me.
Can you please verify?
Thanks
From Latest RSS feed ignore "Suppress category from latest topics" setting, have you tried using the default categories muted site setting instead?
Oh, sorry I have not found it. Thanks! @rishabh @Tracey
Then it’s not a bug of course.
Not the right place for this and it seems decided but that is a big loss of functionality for me.
Muted and suppress are two very different things.
Background: I’m using a “Get Support” category for players, where they can create tickets.
While I don’t want to show thousands of tickets to everyone in latest, I still want that those inflicted get notified about stuff going on there.
I see if I can get a workaround 
Not following at all, they are functionally equivalent except that mute is more flexible
Can you please explain
Alright, let me explain.
As pre info: suppress gives the “Designer/Owner” of a forum control over the usability flow of users. Users do not know all the features, buttons, dropdowns and what not by themselves. Discourse is an active “search that feature” discovery, if you know what I mean.
Sorry for backlinking my forum, but maybe you can follow better then
If you mute a whole (sub)category for everyone, that (sub)category is not shown in this configuration anymore for example:
In this case it is a “Get Support” category with a “Support” sub category.
Muted means, it’s not visible on the front page anymore (the most important landing page for new users, who in this case needs help):
The user has to actively “unmute” that subcategory by himself to see it
Well but then he sees all the “flood” of support tickets from other players on the right side:
With suppress the subcategories were visible for everyone on the left side and just did what I wanted: do not show all the topics from the subcategory on the right side under “latest” but let the user know, that there is a support subcategory
TL;DR: mute is technically similar like suppress but usability wise out of control of designing a specific forum. Users do not find the mute button themselves, don’t know what it do exactly and eventually just don’t get what I want them to get or like you said:
For the user: yes. For the forum owner/designer: no.
I hope I could explain it a bit.
OK, to recap, you were relying on:
Suppress from latest: only removing stuff from /latest topic list
Category mute: remove from /latest topic lists, remove from /categories and left hand panel showing categories.
We have had a lot of confusion around this feature:
I am mixed on how to handle this. As it stands we have a system now that is incredibly easy to explain and provides end users with extreme flexibility. The old “suppress from latest” was not something a user could override and was hidden from users and magical.
Overall, we are going to have to wait on this now for at least 2 weeks to gather more feedback from the community.
Yeah, I can imagine that there are a lot of conflicts and/or confusion 
In my case it’s also rather focused around the desktop style
(Which by the way should be please boosted a lot more. For example “Boxes with Latest Topics” would be awesome. The Desktop page is the “face” of your forum, so it should be beautiful and clear, right? 
)
Alright, I’m interested in how it turns out after 2 weeks.
As a suggestion for mute:
I would just keep categories visible on the desktop page.
I think mute should only count for something “active”. Like topics or posts.
But categories are “static”. They do not harm users, except taking away some pixels on their screens?
Another major difference between the ‘suppress_from_latest’ function and default mute is that when I mute a category, this only hides topics that I’m not watching from the Latest page. I would like to hide a category completely from the Latest page, and this doesn’t seem to be possible with the default mute option.
Can you expand about this a bit? Why would you be watching a topic and not want to see it in your latest feed?
Hey Sam,
We’re running into a similar issue as @B-iggy, if I understand it correctly. We use our forum both for bug reports and community discussion, and we use the “Latest” page as our default page. We previously used a Bugs category (which is only available to verified testers of our app) and suppression to hide bug reports on the frontpage, with the idea that most people don’t need to see other people’s bug reports.
But we still want it to be easy for someone to get to and post to the Bugs category, without needing to unmute anything.
Overall, it’s unclear how this works to me. We did set the Bugs category to be muted for everyone and applied the retroactive change to all users, but for some reason I can still see posts from Bugs in our Latest list, which at the very least harms my personal experience. And I’m not sure if others are having the same experience as me because I don’t know what they can or cannot see it.
You can create a new user, login as that user and see what your regular users see.
Similar use case as above: We organise a conference and have a category where users deliberately go to in order to learn about the speakers. Each of the 100+ speakers has its own topic: Speakers - 1E9
It wouldn’t make sense to have them in our latest feed since the conference context is simply not there. So the suppress from latest feature came in very handy.
Well, it would in a way, that’s why my clamor is limited. 
But the speakers are very important for a conference, of course, and so the more visibility they have the better.
Can you expand on this? The new system actually gives them more visibility cause once someone starts interacting with the topics they will be become tracked and then these topics will start showing up for them in latest.
Well, in our case we have a big segment of people who are not community members, but may come to the conference. So they wouldn’t interact with the topics, but it would good, if they could easily find them.
Also, we gave the speakers a topic each for seo reasons and it works quite well. People learn about the conference, because they google the speakers. If internal links to these speakers are removed, the link juice cannot flow. But maybe I’m missing something, because I haven’t tried it out yet.
Perhaps you should do a banner here that promotes the conf and links to the speakers?
I think I see what you mean. Individual posts from a conference topic is meaningless without the entire conference context. That’s way you don’t want them in Latest. Understandable. But where the problem lies is giving the speakers more visibility without appearing in Latest that the users see first - and which also get populated with individual posts.
Maybe globally pin the conference category so that is always at top. Then if someone wishes to go to the conference, clicking on it will take them to the list of topics (speakers) in that conference… they click on whichever speaker they want and they’re in that discussion.
