If you have a lot of categories you can use the copy to all categories option in the category privileges page. [image: 1628624183885-78e95deb-a343-4013-9564-f63f1b5ad699-image.png]

One of the use cases that I have - FAQ. You create this FAQ as a thread and lock it. If you need to update it - just edit your main post. Second use case - Duplication. You paste the link to the original topic and lock the current one. Does locking a topic make it a noindex page and exclude it from Google search results? I think no

https://github.com/barisusakli/nodebb-plugin-topic-noindex This is a plugin that does it for topics. There is no built in way to do it in core. So to do it for categories you would have to fork and extend the above plugin.

@pitaj that works! Thanks for the reply.

@retipster awesome, looking forward to your email

@retipster said in Trying to understand the fundamental purpose of Groups: For instance, if I've set up a private group in my forum that has view and posting privileges in a hidden category, is there a way to allow only the posts from those group members, that were posted in that hidden category, showing up in the group feed? This would be something we'd be interested in adding to NodeBB core... maybe a group setting to define which categories to show posts in the list.

Not offhand, but perhaps this is something you'd be interested in sponsoring? Reach out to us at [email protected]