Local politics category

When did this become a public group rather than opt in and how do I stop seeing the category in my feed?

This was announced last year after running a poll: Local politics to become a public category [done, with posting restricted to established members]

If you’d like to mute the category, browse here: #local-politics and then choose the following:

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Its interesting to see who all voted for this to become a public group in that straw poll.

Oh yes!

Huh. Until today I only saw the category if I wasn’t logged in. As soon as I logged in, it disappeared. Maybe I had it muted and it somehow became un-muted.

ETA: I have muted the category but am still seeing the most recent post in my feed. Hopefully new ones will not appear. I have changed the post I was still seeing from tracking to normal and now it has disappeared.

I have checked and there are some topics in the category which you have set to “tracked” and “watched” - these will continue to be shown unless you change them to “muted.”

Note that topics are automatically set to “tracked” if you spend 4 minutes or more reading them.

ETA: cross-posted, sorry!

So I opened the boundary commission post, made a cup of coffee, came back and it was tracking because I’d left it open? Doesn’t explain why it appeared in my feed when I don’t normally see local politics though.

If the site thinks that you’ve spent time looking at a topic, it sets it to “tracked”

Our technology cannot distinguish whether you’re making coffee or reading the article. Although I’m sure if Zuckerberg were in charge, he’d find a way

Yes I get that. The bigger mystery is how the category became unmuted in the first place. As I said, until this post today I’ve not seen any, unless not logged in while viewing. However, I did attempt to like Starman’s post about eligibility to vote a few weeks ago, while not logged in (not realising what category it was in). I was prompted to log in, at which point the ‘like’ was activated. Could this have overridden my muting of the entire category?

I’m not sure exactly what happened in this case. The category had been very quiet lately though.

Even if you’re muting a category, you’re still able to browse to topics in it (hence why your like was applied after logging in). It may be that this particular topic then became “tracked” and showed up on your homepage despite the category being muted overall.

No, I’ve had a look at the category and I definitely haven’t seen any of the threads there in my feed until today. I would remember if I had. There are topics from the past week, for instance, about local hustings that I haven’t seen (correctly). Something happened to make today’s topic visible to me when it shouldn’t have been.