Hi, I’ve got a use case where I’d like to suppress certain categories and subcategories from having their posts appear in the latest feed without making them inaccessible to users. Ideally, any post a user posts on or follows would then appear in their latest feed, but this isn’t super important as long as they still receive notifications and stuff about replies.
The main reason for this is that the forum essentially has an administrative section that has very high activity, but the posts there flood the latest list which reduces the discoverability and visibility of actual community discussions. Each topic in the administrative sections are usually only relevant to a handful of users, but at the same time users need to be able to easily find these categories if needed.
The default view on the forum is categories because that seems to be the most user friendly for anyone who isn’t familiar with Discourse.
Attempts
Here’s what I’ve tried to accomplish my goal, and why it didn’t work out.
Muted Tags
I tried using muted tags on all the posts that should be suppressed by default. Users could still easily find the categories and subcategories, including making their own posts, but it was not easily discoverable that there were tags muted by default. Users who were looking for posts that had been made by others in those categories would see none without any clear way to bring them back. To the user, the most obvious reality was that the posts just didn’t exist.
Muted Categories
I tried muting all the categories that I wanted posts suppressed by default in. I had thought that this would simply move the category down into the “Muted” collapsed section and remove topics from latest, but it seems like there are some quirks.
- The “Muted” collapsed section only appears for logged in users, but most people searching for the administrative sections have never used the forums before, so they can’t find it.
- Muted subcategories are completely removed from the subcategories list visible at the top of categories with subcategories, even for logged in users.
Solution?
It looks like GitHub - discourse/discourse-categories-suppressed might do sort of what I want, but I can’t find a plugin details page or anything about it other than some people referencing it and the GitHub repository. One of the potential issues with this is that I assume it doesn’t allow users to override the suppression, so someone interested in the administrative sections, like an administrator, can’t do anything to make it so that they see the topics in their own latest feed.
Does anyone know of a better solution for what I’m trying to accomplish, or is this the best option right now?