"Suppressed from latest" category vs. "muted" category. What is the difference?

I understand that the “Suppressed from latest” was removed at some point from Discourse. While it was very self explanatory, I can’t say the same about “muted”. Can you explain what “muted” means and whether I can use it to have the same functionality of “suppressed”?

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I’ll do my best to explain both below:

The “Suppressed from latest” feature is essentially a forced global mute for a specific category. The category still appears as it normally would on the Categories page, but topics from suppressed categories do not appear on the Latest page. It effectively takes away the user’s power to customize some of their experience on the Latest page. Some community managers find this behavior helpful under specific circumstances. The feature was split out into a plugin: https://github.com/discourse/discourse-categories-suppressed

With muting, you can mute topics, tags, categories, and even users. Each context is a little different, though:

  • Topic: You will never be notified of anything about the topic, and it will not appear in latest.
  • Tag: You will not be notified of anything about new topics with the tag, and they will not appear on your unread tab. (Note that there is a remove muted tags from latest site setting to tweak muted tag behavior).
  • Category: You will never be notified of anything about new topics in the category, and they will not appear in latest. Muted categories are placed at the end of the category list on the Categories page and appear much less prominently.
  • Users: Suppress all posts, notifications, and PMs from a user

As an admin, you can set default muted tags and categories from your site settings. However, users will always be able to override the defaults from their user preferences.

There is also a mute all categories by default site setting that creates an opt-in experience for users.

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I’ve read through the debates about the mute feature vs the suppress feature and I align with @sam’s reasoning about wanting to let forum users control their own Latest feed.

However, the mute feature has one dealbreaker for me.

I just want to hide categories and their sub-categories from the global latest view (the “homepage”), however muting the sub-categories also hides them from the parent category’s latest view. In my use case, this means someone might navigate to the parent category and wrongly believe there are no posts because they’re all hidden within sub-categories.

Conversely, if I just mute the parent category, sub-category posts still appear in the global latest view, which makes muting the parent effectively useless for this purpose.

It seems there is no way for me to hide an entire category (parent + subcategories) from the global latest view, but then still have full visibility within the parent category.

If I mute the sub-category, the visibility of sub-category topics is as follows

  • Global Latest
  • Parent Category Latest
  • Sub-category Latest

If I mute the parent category, the visibility of sub-category topics is as follows

  • Global Latest
  • Parent Category Latest
  • Sub-category Latest

I want the visibility of sub-category topics to be as follows

  • Global Latest
  • Parent Category Latest
  • Sub-category Latest

Would the discourse-categories-suppressed plugin address my needs or is this a change that needs to be made to the mute feature?

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Apparently, it appears under a “Muted categories” spoiler. Any way to never hide any muted categories under such a spoiler?

The default is now that a muted category get hidden into a collapsible table at the bottom of the the categories page.
I’m trying to achieve to have a muted category to keep appearing in its normal place in the categories page (but to turn off notifications from its topics and hide its topics from the latest topics as well).

From my understanding, by using the discourse-categories-suppressed plugin I could just hide some specific category posts from the latest topics, but there would not be a way to prevent some users to receive notifications for them.

Do you guys know by chance if there is a way to achieve the result I’m looking for? (to mute a category but keep it listed in the categories page).
Thank you!

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