Suppress category from latest topics gone

[kam44]

No, I just checked, it’s not in the muted categories, because I didn’t use this feature, I used the old feature to hide from latest.

What can I do ?

[Stephen]

@Stephen

One site which has used this feature heavily for the past ~four or five years has just asked me to quote for a plug-in to restore the behavior.

Small update on this, the community in question doesn’t want to wrangle with muting and having specific topics appear in latest once a user interacts. Their solution is to have me deploy a whole additional discourse instance (integrated with SSO).

In their case they’re producing 20-50 topics per day in categories which were suppressed from latest, mostly via the WordPress plugin.

They’re going to lose the suggested topics tie-in, which is a pity. It feels like overkill, but they don’t want to deal with muting so I do get it. When I presented the option I had hoped they would see it as the nuclear option and would be willing to try muting, but apparently not. Their choices really boiled down to (1) move comments to another platform, (2) use muting, or (3) split commenting out.

In 6 months they’ll re-review whether they move comments away from Discourse entirely.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I really don’t understand this use case, why would you not want to see a topic you are explicitly tracking in latest, you expressed strong interest in it

[Stephen]

Commenting was a feature that the delivery of discourse “swept up”. Users and staff have been educated/encouraged to visit the articles category so that they aren’t only seeing the topics they’ve already chosen to interact with. Suppress from latest effectively allowed them to throw up a partition between the community content and their article discussion, their preferred solution lets that practice continue.

The fear is/was that if you can see article topics you’ve already interacted with in /latest you won’t be so inclined to visit the category, and are less likely to jump into other article discussion you haven’t previously participated in.

Their community topic volume versus the volume of articles is such that if all articles appeared in /latest it would occasionally push other active topics below the fold. Back when this site went live four or five years ago that did happen, which is why suppress from latest was so useful. The hope is that users will visit the front end of the site to see articles, but even if they don’t they can still drop into that category and participate directly within Discourse.

The new instance will have the same effect, navigation between the two will be tied together. The obvious new risk is that they’ll miss notifications from one instance whilst browsing the other. It’s imperfect, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[B-iggy]

@sam

why would you not want to see a topic you are explicitly tracking in latest, you expressed strong interest in it

1. “Strong interest” is a claim, which does not count for all situations. A support ticket for example, gets handled once by the admin and then you don’t have interest in it anymore. => It stills shows up on the landing page (latest) after though, pushing valuable discussions away.
2. Tracking and see=visibility are 2 different things. For tracking you already have the awesome notification area.
   
   But for visibility you had only this great “Suppress” feature, where you can keep it clean. (compare it to a newsletter if you want)

[amotl (Andreas Motl)]

Hi there,

on https://community.hiveeyes.org/, we also used this feature in order to suppress topics from specific categories explicitly from showing up in the list of latest posts.

While we actually like the new feature, we would also like to vote for additionally(?) restoring the Suppress from latest mechanism.

@B-iggy

that is a big loss of functionality for me

We second that.

@sam

to recap, you were relying on: Suppress from latest: only removing stuff from /latest topic list

True.

@sam

The old “suppress from latest” was not something a user could override and was hidden from users and magical.

I hear you wrt. the perspective of the user: This will give her way more flexibility. However, we have the admin/moderators perspective here where we would like to control/override specific things.

@sam

we are going to have to wait on this now for at least 2 weeks to gather more feedback from the community.

Thanks for listening!

@reswild

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.

This.

@domhofmann

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.

This similar to our use case.

@sam

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.

True. We appreciate the new flexibility very much. However, in my case I am the one who is bumping lots of topics within that specific category actually and I still don’t want them to appear the post within “latest” without having to counter that action by going through bulk state setting updates.

@Dmitry_Krasnoperov

We used «Suppress category from latest topics» features as filter of messages from Classified section from Main discussion (it’s filter, not muted)!

Also, similar to our use case.

Thanks again for listening and with kind regards,
Andreas.

[amotl (Andreas Motl)]

Hi again,

we just found out that the transition of this feature from suppress to muting also had an impact when using the Knowledge Explorer Plugin. After the rebuild (database migration?), categories marked as suppressed apparently became muted and thus have been implicitily suppressed from displaying within the Knowledge Explorer. @tshenry was quick to help me finding out about this within Topics not displayed in Knowledge Explorer while I’ve almost given up on that – thanks again!

I conclude this is a reasonable scenario which shows that the suppress-in-latest and the muted features are orthogonal to each other, each – while similar – is fulfilling its own kind of functionality.

Use case: You might want to suppress topics showing up in latest but still display them when it is a topic located within a category designated for the Knowledge Explorer. I believe the fact that topics which have been designated to the Knowledge Explorer in any way should implicitly have a higher significance of being displayed.

As I recognize your strong opinions on that, @sam: As I am still not seeing through how the muted mechanics might be able to replace the suppress mechanics 1:1, I well believe I might have a huge blind spot on this. Sorry for my ignorance if you feel I am still missing your point completely and please correct me if I am wrong on that.

With kind regards,
Andreas.

[reswild]

@sam

I really don’t understand this use case, why would you not want to see a topic you are explicitly tracking in latest, you expressed strong interest in it

Well, first of all, I’m not explicitly tracking or expressing strong interest in anything - the tracking just happens automatically when I interact with a topic.

More importantly, I already have a separate workflow for handling staff tasks and support tickets, and I already get a notification for topics I’m tracking in the notification area, so I have no need for these to also show up on the Latest page. The reason I check the Latest page is to see if there are any other (non-task-related) activity on the site, and if the Latest page is filled up with my support tickets, this just makes it more difficult for me to find the other content.

[vinothkannans (Vinoth Kannan)]

My 2 cents, these use cases are looking very similar to an archived category. Except that the archived categories won’t be displayed anywhere in the list (/top, /categories).

[B-iggy]

If they are not displayed anywhere, it’s not similar

@sam

Overall, we are going to have to wait on this now for at least 2 weeks to gather more feedback from the community.

So what are your thoughts @sam and @codinghorror since 15 days have passed?
I think the interest is very high and it was basically a feature removal, without compensation - since mute is not the solution at all here.

If you totally don’t want to reimplement this feature, many would love and need, can you maybe at least let us know, how we can “hack” it back our own please?
I mean has a plugin the technical chance to do the same (all API calls available etc., maybe even CSS hacks)?

[JimPas]

A major difference is that an archived category is as they say… like a statue. You can read it, but not make a post or reply to it and not “like” a post.

[ClawdiaWolf (Claudia)]

@sam

@Dmitry_Krasnoperov

BUT when customers come to main PRIVATE CLASSIFFIED page all items from subsection are

This sounds like an edge case to me. A complicated one.

Basically what you seem to be asking is for a new rule:

• If you visit a muted category then display all the muted subcategories.

I am slowly thinking this all boils down to “How strong do you want mute category to be” user pref:

When a category is muted : suppress from latest topics | suppress everywhere

Then an end user can opt to “how strong a mute” actually is. We may even add an in-between kind of thing. suppress from latest topics and categories

@codinghorror what are your thoughts here. I am thinking restoring previous functionality is only possible if we allow end users to choose “how atomic” mutes are.

The upside of this entire system is that end users are in control here. If someone wants to see Private classified/Digital sources in latest they can, previously this was impossible.

I’m a moderator on a set of forums that could not reasonably function without the supress from latest feature, as @Heather_Dudley can tell you. I was actually going to suggest something very much like what you propose as an alternative. I’d prefer it to be an option that is set at the category level like the tracking and watching options myself but I also know I’m probably one of the few users of Discourse for whom that level of control is ideal so it’s not reasonable to ask for that much work.

[Andy_Hendrikx]

Moderator from a cryptocurrency platform reporting in.

We are also missing the suppress function currently. We have a trading category on our forum which was quite popular, but the discussions were of a low quality. To not let that flood the decent topics from other categories on the frontpage we suppressed that category.

Can someone point me out to a workaround?

Thanks!

[testingsoftware]

we were going to implement a feature that was tested and worked with the “suppress from latest” option which is:
three of our categories are private and members have to join a group to access these categories, and be able to create, reply and see. then these categories were “suppressed from latest” so no one outside that group could see the posts.

How can we achieve this now that “suppress from latest” is gone?

Thanks.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

You don’t have a problem. If the categories are visible only to group members then they will be in /latest only for those who have permission.

This discussion is about hiding from /latest topics that everyone has permission to see.

[testingsoftware]

thanks, I got confused…

A.

[j127]

Is there any way to keep topics off the homepage (latest) without muting anything? We have foreign language categories that shouldn’t be listed in “latest” but also shouldn’t be muted, because they are the main part of the forum for some people.

I was wondering why posts in Chinese were suddenly appearing in the latest posts for all users.

Edit: I’m still on 2.4.0.beta7, and I can’t see the foreign language categories on the /categories page any more, so I think that users won’t be able to find them. Is that related to this change?

[Dmitry_Krasnoperov]

@B-iggy

So what are your thoughts @sam and @codinghorror since 15 days have passed?

Yep, it would be great to hear from team what’s vision here.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

Is it just a matter of adding those categories to default categories muted in site settings rather than controlling that on the category pages? That seems much easier anyway. So now I don’t understand what the hulabaloo is except that the setting didn’t get copied over when the interface change got made.

EDIT: Oh, but that doesn’t apply to anonymous users?

And then there’s no easy way to get the right groups of people with the proper muted categories in their profile.

EDIT: OK, so if you mute the category it hides from latest, and if you know how to get to the category you can see it, but when you mute it, the category goes away from the categories view. I think that if a muted category showed up in the categories view, it’d be almost the same as it was before.