Hi Mette,

thank you for sharing your question with us. I get your challenge, sometimes you would like these topics not to be prominent e.g. in widgets / search… But maybe you could elaborate a little bit on which effect you would like to see when you try to “hide” such content?

We do not have a real feature that does exactly what you want, however there are some options… Some examples:

• If you are using a search integration (e.g. community content visible in the search on your company homepage), then you could tweak the api in a way that marked content does not show up. More concrete: On my previous community I used to add a special Moderator tag to very negative topics, by doing so these topics will not be listed in the search results anymore.
• You could think of having a category on your community only visible to logged-in users. This would have the result that content in these categories would not show up in Google and the community search any more (if a visitor is not logged in). The downside of course is that you probably would have to create a seperate category and move specific content there.

Again it would be interesting to hear what your ideal goal / desired experience would look like, maybe I can give you better tips then.

Also, some content should not be hidden, but rather be improved or dealt with. It should be pointed out that often very negative topics can be an opportunity: While you might not be able to improve the sentiment or convince the topic starter in any way, remember that people who will visit this topic will read your response and have a positive experience reading your reply. I had various cases where I had a big impact on general customer sentiment, while the individual topic starter remained unhappy...