Is this because you are never going to allow your users to post in the parent forums or is this just that you do not want it to show when there are no topics?

i wont allow anyone to post in the parent forum that way everything can stay organized 

out of curiosity, why?  what is the point of the parent/sub forum relationships?  why not making Gaming a group vice parent forum if there will be nothing at the Gaming level?

We can show you how to remove from display, but want to make sure we understand the use case…  removing from display wont stop them from going there or from it being in the permalink…

well the reason why is because its going to have all the gaming console discussions in their own forum and instead of taking up valuable space on the main forum page with all of them i put them in a sub forum,where the actual sub forum doesnt need to have any topics..otherwise people will use it to post their gaming discussion and mods will always be moving topics in the correct forum.

We dont really have a method for having ‘dummy’ parent forums like that…  so you cannot make them completely unfunctional…  but you can remove the stuff you allude in the picture..  since what is displayed in your forum is theme and template tag driven, you need to just alter it…

in this case, we are talking forum view, so in your sp theme edit the spForumView.php template file…  and remove the parent forum display stuff…  it will be the section that starts with:

                # Start the ‘forumHeader’ section
                # ———————————————————————-
                sp_SectionStart(‘tagClass=spForumViewSection’, ‘forum’);

and ends with:

                sp_SectionEnd(”, ‘forum’);

just remove it and it wont show…  you likely also want to remove these sections:

                # Start the ‘pagelinks’ section
                # ———————————————————————-
                sp_SectionStart(‘tagId=spTopicNewButtonTop&tagClass=spPlainSection’, ‘pageLinks’);
                    sp_TopicNewButton(‘tagClass=spButton spRight’, __sp(‘Add Topic’), __sp(‘Start a new topic’), __sp(‘This forum is locked’), __sp(‘No permission to start topics’));
                    sp_TopicIndexPageLinks(”, __sp(‘Page: ‘), __sp(‘Jump to page %PAGE% of topics’), __sp(‘Jump to page’));
                sp_SectionEnd(‘tagClass=spClear’, ‘pageLinks’);

and

                # Start the ‘pagelinks’ section
                # ———————————————————————-
                sp_SectionStart(‘tagClass=spPlainSection’, ‘pageLinks’);
                    sp_TopicNewButton(‘tagId=spTopicNewButtonBottom&tagClass=spButton spRight’, __sp(‘Add Topic’), __sp(‘Start a new topic’), __sp(‘This forum is locked’), __sp(‘No permission to start topics’));
                    sp_TopicIndexPageLinks(”, __sp(‘Page: ‘), __sp(‘Jump to page %PAGE% of topics’), __sp(‘Jump to page’));
                    sp_InsertBreak();
                sp_SectionEnd(”, ‘pageLinks’);

since there wont be pages and you dont want an Add Topic button…

give that a try and see if it does what you want…

as always, we strongly recommend that you make a child theme or your own theme to keep from losing changes on updates to out themes…  see:

https://simple-press.com/documentation/codex/themes/theme-basics/creating-a-theme/
https://simple-press.com/simplepress-version-5-5-child-themes/

Alright thanks i will give it a try

let us know how you make out…