Want to delete 'About this Topic'

Support
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We’re creating a forum for a book club. Each category will be a book title. Each child category will be a chapter title. That way participants can ask a question or make a comment about specific chapters of each book. So we don’t need the automatic post ‘About this topic’. Can I delete it? If not, if I make it ‘unlisted’ will it be invisible to users? What about closing it or archiving it? I just want to to disappear.

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Those topics are where the topic description is stored. AFAIK you can unlist it, but nothing more.

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If you unlist it, it will be visible only to staff.

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Thanks, Thorge. I’m impressed by how helpful and prompt the Discourse Community members are.

I don’t know whether we’re on a Linux server or not. But the solution will work in any case. However, it seems like just unlisting it will make
it invisible to users. Since we’d have to remove or delete regularly as we added new book and chapter categories, actual deleting would be cumbersome. So unlisting seems like the easiest and best solution.

I’m curious why I see your reply in my email, but not in the thread of replies to my original post.

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Thanks, Stephen.

Here’s how I just responded to Thorge:

Thanks, Thorge. I’m impressed by how helpful and prompt the Discourse Community members are.

I don’t know whether we’re on a Linux server or not. But the solution will work in any case. However, it seems like just unlisting it will make
it invisible to users. Since we’d have to remove or delete regularly as we added new book and chapter categories, actual deleting would be cumbersome. So unlisting seems like the easiest and best solution.

I’m curious why I see your reply in my email, but not in the thread of replies to my original post.

9

As described, you cannot delete it, as it would break things.

You can use this code at the rails console to unlist all about topics:

cats = Category.all

cats.each do |cat|
  puts "Process #{cat.name} -- #{cat.topic_id}"
  if cat.topic_id.to_i > 0
    t = Topic.find(cat.topic_id)
    t.visible=false
    t.save
  end
end

If you want it only for some categories, you’ll need to adjust the code.

If you want it to happen automatically, you’d need a plugin that did something like the above on a regular basis (or, better, got triggered when a new category was created).

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Almost everything has been said, I just wanted to give my experience. Here is what I do with these topics

  • unpin the topic
  • lock it
  • unlist it

After a few topics, you won’t see if anymore, it will be at the bottom of the topic list. And if you edit the description at some point and the topic get bumped in the topic list, there is the new option to reset bump date, it will go at the bottom of the category again

image

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The post from @thorge was removed because it isn’t a solution to your problem and would break your categories at a fundamental level.

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@pfaffman you’re the man. I had no idea you could so that globally. :facepunch:t3:

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