For the record, I donāt consider this to be a solution to the initial issue. An important feature of forums is the ability to discover content one hasnāt explicitly chosen to follow, and thus create serendipitous connections within the community and strengthen its bonds. Thatās why I go to the Latest and New listings: even though I have followed several categories and tags explicitly, I know that there are likely topics that will be interesting to me in ways I havenāt predicted, so every now and then I take a look at the main page to scan the topic titles and open those that pique my interest. Of course, that is only possible for the languages I am capable of reading, so Iāve had to mute the Communities category to hide topics from local communities whose posts are in languages I donāt speak.
The new sidebar feature doesnāt seem to serve this need, unless Iām misreading what it does.
On the other hand, muting the Communities category (whose subcategories typically contain topics of local interest only, and often written in the local languages) by default would allow this discovery and exploration to take place, without harming the ability of people to become aware of content in the muted categories, by means of followed tags, mentions, navigation to those categories, tracking specific topics within them, or simply opting in to following them, thus overriding the default.
Muting the parent #communities category should mute all the children ones:
Is this working consistently here?
Muting any category by default to everyone has the negative effect that people who is part of a local community is affected, vs the existing ability for individuals who want the /new and /latest sections to hide particular or all community topics.
Exactly. We tried and you get notifocations on a direct mention or via a tag you are watching. Do having local communities muted by default should work fine.
I donāt know what will happen if you now change muting globally. Probably you would have to reset all existing manual settings.
Can you try on a demo instance?
This feature does not appear to be working correctly. I have the Communities category muted, but I still get posts showing up that are in subcategories that I havenāt (yet) muted:
