Unlisted topics - what are they

Support
1

What is ‘toggle unlisted’ for in the compose window? What is an unlisted topic actually?

2

Hided, kind of. It doesn’t show up in /latest etc but is there. But if someone knows topic that user can see it. Plus staff of course.

I’m using unlisting in two cases:

  • unmature sending (quite easy mistake on iPad anyway)
  • topic needs some extra care taking or it is in waiting list, and I want to be sure most of users don’t see it.
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3

Points of note:

  • An unlisted topic will not show up in a search using the Discourse search, even as a category moderator they do not show up in a search which makes them hard to find at times.

  • A topic that is listed then converted to unlisted may have been indexed by a search engine such as Google before becoming unlisted. As such while these topics are hard to find with a Discourse search they are easier to find with a Google search even though one of the points of unlisting them is to keep them from being found with a search engine.

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4

In addition to what Jagster said, here is a more indepth explanation

The difference between Closed, Unlisted and Archived topics Eric beat me to it haha

Mmh yeah that was an issue for me and others so I tend to use shared drafts now or the schedule publish topic timer from a private category.

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5

This is the default for embedded topics to post as unlisted but that can be changed in settings:

Can be a helpful feature for draft of topic to be posted as unlisted first to review/edit before making public.

The public can still see unlisted topics if they have a link to url.

6

As a small tip, you can add ?status=unlisted to a topic list URL and filter to just those ones (as long as you have permission to see them, so TL4+)

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7

That should be emphasized. Until a topic list was used, was not having success with the qualifier, e.g.

https://community.openai.com/latest?status=unlisted

Topic list: https://community.openai.com/latest
Qualifier: ?status=unlisted