Suppress category from latest topics gone

j127 · December 11, 2019, 7:01am

The main things I’m trying to figure out are:

how to get our non-English categories back on the /categories page for everyone so that people can find them
how to keep those non-English posts off the /latest page by default (most users only want English, but Chinese posts are appearing on the /latest page at the moment)

I’m assuming that those categories are missing now because of this change, but I’m not sure exactly what happened. Those categories appear for some users, but not others. Example: my original admin user can see only one out of eight non-English categories, but my newer test user can see all eight non-English categories.

sam · December 11, 2019, 7:34am

For now I recommend you pin a topic to your forum explaining the change with direct links to the categories and explaining how logged on users can “unmute” language specific categories.

The more I think about it in your case you simply want the mute to be strong, if you can not speak Swahili no point in you ever seeing the Swahili category anywhere ever.

They should not show up if they are default muted, only topics people explicitly track will show up. Anon will not see any of them.

j127 · December 13, 2019, 10:06am

After more investigation, it looks like older users had those categories muted, which seems to mean that those categories can’t be found by most users.

The reason that some foreign language posts were showing on the home page is that I may have read enough of those topics to unmute them.

The reason that I could only see the Nederlands category and not the other non-English sections is that the muting must have happened before we added that category. The other non-English categories were older. I’m guessing that the test user could see all of them, because the test user may have been created after the change.

In our case, the categories should be discoverable for all users. The non-English sections aren’t as active as the English sections, but there are VIP people who post in there, and some enthusiasts will translate them with the browser even if they don’t reply.

It isn’t a long-term solution, but for now it’s better if all users have those categories unmuted. I’ll try to write a plugin that lets people mute categories with one click while viewing any topic in that category and/or maybe a list of checkboxes for those categories on the settings page.

Is there a quick way that we could unmute all of those non-English categories for all users?

Also, is there anyone else out there who has foreign language sections? What is your solution?

Robert_Fay · December 16, 2019, 1:24pm

Has there been a plug in designed to return the suppress category from latest feature. While I appriciate the access to the all the pages we designed our forum using the suppress feature and without it the user experience is really bad. We have a majority English forum at this time, however we have categories for Chinese and Spanish. These will likely become independent forums in the future, however for the time being we have them on our English forum and have them hidden from latest. We also have some informational posts we have hidden as well.

I like to think of this as my tool box. The Screwdrivers and wrenches are right on top because I use them everyday. The timing light and other specialty tools are in the bottom because they are nice to have and help but not needed every day. The new feature now makes me dig through all my tools every time I want to get to the screwdrivers.

This may not be the case on everyone’s site, however this is how we designed our forum around the tools we were given and now you have severely impacted our user experience for the worse. If we redesigned with the new set we would have done things differently I am sure. A way to plug in the suppress or revert to the old version would be appreciated.

-Robert

MarcP · December 17, 2019, 3:35am

I also want the feature back. Mute is a user pref. Suppress is a admin control feature. I as an admin would like to control and decide what comes up on latest and users should not have the option to override. Muting is just for signed in users and not for anonymous users. We can not control what is on the homepage and what not. Please restore this feature.

Dmitry_Krasnoperov · December 17, 2019, 6:39am

We get traffic decrease in Classified sections and a lot of questions “we all the fresh classfieds gone?”

B-iggy · December 17, 2019, 10:43am

@sam you often say you don’t understand why we all scream about this removal.
This summarize it also perfectly:

Can you please share the progress / timeline when we can expect a plugin for this functionality please?
I must honestly say with all your recent efforts to push theme / theme component development and what not, this feature removal (which is part of theme design) makes me confused and bit disappointed.

My last input here: Many others and I would really appreciate a comeback of Suppress category from latest topic as admin setting or plugin. Maybe as christmas present?

Anyways, be sure I appreciate what all of you did with Discourse - it’s the best Forum software out there!
Have nice holidays!

mreach · December 18, 2019, 5:02am

We very much need this suppress category from latest function back. Can you please explain where we can re-enable this or point us in the direction to create a plugin to re-create this functionality. It’s pretty essential for some of our scenarios where we want to create “debate” style options for users, but do NOT want this to show up for the latest feed (for example).

sam · December 18, 2019, 5:29am

I already said we will make a plugin, expect one by the end of Jan, if you need it faster

if you are our customer contact our support
if you are not feel free to open a #marketplace topic

I do not expect us to ship an anti user feature in core, just cause I speak French it does not make me a second class user, I should be allowed to see French in my home page

vinothkannans · December 18, 2019, 5:36am

FTR, Discourse already have plugin callbacks to filter the topic result in the latest page.

github.com

discourse/discourse/blob/875f0d8fd86be84e3ef54381108480d8592bc528/lib/topic_query.rb#L472-L475


# plugins can remove topics here:
self.class.results_filter_callbacks.each do |filter_callback|
  result = filter_callback.call(:latest, result, @user, options)
end

Example code for plugin

github.com

discourse/discourse-tagging/blob/84a99dffe5e3a10d2b0b8e9421bf3714378e0230/plugin.rb#L502-L537


if TopicQuery.respond_to?(:results_filter_callbacks)
  remove_muted_for_lists = [:latest, :new]
  remove_muted_tags = Proc.new do |list_type, result, user, options|
    if user.nil? || !remove_muted_for_lists.include?(list_type) ||
        !SiteSetting.tagging_enabled || !SiteSetting.remove_muted_tags_from_latest
      result
    else
      muted_tags = DiscourseTagging.muted_tags(user)
      if muted_tags.empty?
        result
      else
        showing_tag = if options[:filter]
          f = options[:filter].split('/')
          f[0] == 'tags' ? f[1] : nil
        else
          nil
        end


        if muted_tags.include?(showing_tag)
          result # if viewing the topic list for a muted tag, show all the topics

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RGJ · February 9, 2021, 12:30am

We built a plugin because we have some clients depending on this functionality as well.
@vinothkannans thanks for the pointers.

Robert_Fay · December 18, 2019, 4:32pm

Sam,

I am grateful that there is an option coming for this. I am not in hurry if it is coming in January, however I will make a note in support.

This is certainly not the intention on our site, however we have heard some frustrations that people need sort through topics they can’t read in order to find the topics they need. We also direct users to different (product) websites depending on language they speak because part documentation is different.

I wondering if there is a better way to separate these. Currently we are testing languages and building categories with the intentions that if they start drawing traffic that we will build them into their own forum. Optimally I want the best user experience for everyone. I don’t want a new user to struggle because of multiple languages to sift through and I don’t want returning community members to feel like second class citizens.

Currently our thoughts are using the suppress category and as we get traffic looking at an additional forum. I really like how community.wd.com has done their languages, however I am not sure I fully understand how it is working. It appears to use hidden categories, however German for instance does not show up on the categories page.

-Robert

B-iggy · February 9, 2021, 12:31am

Thanks @sam for the timeframe (even though we are still not on the same page about this ““anti user feature””)

Anyways, thanks @vinothkannans and ultimately thanks @RGJ for providing this plugin!
After a first issue and a super fast fix, I can confirm I have my beloved forum theme and flow for my users back! Happy days.
I consider this “ticket” as closed for now

Dmitry_Krasnoperov · December 18, 2019, 9:33pm

CAN’T BE HAPPIER!!!

amotl · December 18, 2019, 11:07pm

Thank you so much for stepping in so quickly, @RGJ!

I feel a bit silly now to say on https://community.hiveeyes.org/, even after activating the plugin within settings, we don’t see the option at the place within the category settings where it was before:

Did we miss something here or might there be something wrong with our instance of Discourse? We are running 2.4.0.beta8.

amotl · December 18, 2019, 11:49pm

It was us. After deactivating and reactivating the plugin again (better safe than sorry), we found the option at the very bottom of the category settings tab. We probably just missed that before.

@RGJ: We can confirm it works perfectly again, thank you so much and sorry for the noise.

mreach · December 20, 2019, 5:51am

THANK YOU @RGJ! Please give the explicit app.yml line on the GitHub page under installation instructions vs pointing to the general install page just like GitHub - curiousdannii/discourse-merge-users: A Discourse forum plugin for merging users does it.

Dmitry_Krasnoperov · December 23, 2019, 5:15am

Hi,
Does this plugin filter out suppressed messages from New category as well for you?

md-misko · December 23, 2019, 4:02pm

Thank you so much for this plugin, it does restore ‘suppress from latest’, but unfortunately it also causes tag filtering to stop working as it did before.

When this setting is enabled, selecting a tag under a topic no longer returns topics from categories that have ‘suppress from latest’ enabled. As soon as this setting is disabled, tag filtering works as expected.

I hope this is something that can be easily fixed, I really appreciate your efforts on this one, and thanks again.

RGJ · December 23, 2019, 5:14pm

I will take a look at that in the course of this week, shouldn’t be too hard to fix.