However, Discourse is suggesting cross-category topics. Here, I open the Feedback category and start typing words about a feature request, and I’m told that what I’m typing is similar to a post in the Extra Questions category.
I think that may be a misunderstanding. As I understand it, the setting is for the suggested topics that are displayed under a topic. It’s not for “your topic is similar to”.
The suggested topics below this feedback topic are all from the feedback category.
I figure the behavior you see in the Composer is intentional. IMHO it makes sense to warn of similar topics sitewide. There could easily be duplicates across, say, #bugs and #UX.
And despite the preselected category option in the dropdown, you haven’t actually posted the topic within a category yet. You could change the category selection at any point.
The composer defaults to show the current category, if you were in one – but you can also call the composer from the home page with no category selected.
In this particular Discourse instance, it does not make sense to suggest that a new topic is similar to a topic in another category. I recognize that there are plenty of other Discourse instances for which that is not true; I run two of them right now! But my three categories (which are reserved for the actual questions asked for the three levels of ham radio examination in the US, one category per level) intentionally don’t even allow normally-privileged site users to create new topics; there is one topic per question.
If there’s no way to exclude categories from being suggested this way, is there a way to entirely disable the suggestions in the composer? I’d prefer to exclude those categories, but in this case it’s going to be a huge distraction and nuisance to have those popping up. (I did look in site settings and didn’t see anything else, but I also understand I might have simply missed or misunderstood!)
There was one, but that setting was removed in May. The documentation is outdated. But maybe increasing Min title similar length or Minimum topics similar to 2,000,000,000 helps too. The guide also provides CSS to hide all composer pop-up messages.
As Moin said, the doc is slated for updating, but for the curious…
max_similar_results is the one that was removed in May. Notes on that action : “Updates the composer similar topics tips to return a maximum of 3 topic results. We are phasing out the site setting in an effort to improve the UX in the composer.”
min_topic_count_similar_results seems to have become minimum_topics_similar
