@Carleas All the categories list the latest 3 posts, after the pinned posts…. except Rant & Sandbox, which only show 1 pinned post each, and Religion, which is crowded out by pinned posts, and Meta, which excludes the pinned post.
Can you set a rule that only one (if any) pinned post is displayed, and the other at least two are unpinned posts?
You can set whether a pinned post stays pinned for you. Click the thumbtack (grey icon on the left side of the title) and then refresh the page and it won’t show up at the top anymore, nor on the category page.
If you want a pinned post to show up on the category page, you can restore the pin set it to be pinned again.
Sometimes just opening a pinned topic will unpin it, can’t recall if that’s a user setting or a setting on the topic, but in either case you should be able to override it by setting the pin manually.
Regular users do not pin posts.
Correct. Mods can create pinned posts, but each user can decide for themselves if a pinned post stays pinned.
OK I figured out how to do it. Thank you. But why do the sandbox and rant categories only have the most recent post and not three like the other categories?
That’s a setting; they are disfavored categories, intended to house disfavored posts (mere low-quality in Sandbox, more vicious junk in Rant).
Interesting. Thank you.
@Carleas I don’t feel this thread is low quality. Can it please be moved out of the sandbox? There are many others like it in the sandbox. Perhaps folks did not know the sandbox was supposed to be for low quality posts? I didn’t until you just told me today.
I’m happy to move threads at the OP’s request.
The Sandbox description is (and as far as I can remember, has always been):
Low-quality isn’t meant as a put-down, there’s nothing wrong with work-shopping a half-formed idea to help figure it out before making a fully-formed post about it.
I like that description better 
Now only the rant house and Meta are showing any post(s) underneath their categories on the homepage.
Strange, I don’t see that on my end. Are you on desktop or mobile? Did you try refreshing the page?
The screenshots appear in reverse order. I did click refresh.
I can confirm I’m seeing the same on mobile as Ich, but not on desktop.
Yeah, I see it on mobile too. It looks like it’s not showing topics for subcategories (Meta and Rant are top level categories, the others are under Philosophy Forums, Social Forums, etc.
Let me poke around and see what’s up.
There’s a bug report from 4 days ago, I bumped it and will keep an eye on it.
Just to confirm, this is new as of today? Want to be sure this is due to this morning’s update.
OK, I found a workaround that I can live with. You should see topics for all the categories now. If it doesn’t show up at first, click into the parent category and then click back to the home page/all categories page.
It’s not ideal, because not the subcategories show up within the parent categories as well, so if e.g. you want to see all the topics in all the Philosophy Forums, you see the list of subforums with featured topics at the top of the page, and have to scroll down to see the full topic list.
But that’s better than nothing showing up on the home page, so I’ll leave it like this pending a proper fix.
Ugh, the fix does not persist, the next time you load the page it’s broken again.
OK, temporary fix will be to change the home page to show categories with featured posts, and increase the number shown in the Philosophy Forums group to get a bit broader representation. Not ideal, but pending a bugfix it will have to do.
Confirmed this was a bug, and they’ve released a patch. I’ll run an update tomorrow morning and we’ll be back to normal.
