Hi, Alan,

You will find the option for "Use category as container" under Components/Categories/General/Category Settings. Once you change it to "Yes", no posts will be allowed under that particular category and it will not affect the subcategories.

On the front-end, your users will see a grayed-out option for the container category and not be able to choose that for posts.

Thanks!

Dear development team, it will really help to have full documentation for user reference. Unless one is contended with using the product out of the box, customization would take up more time than ordinarily necessary, searching through support forum and testing the functionality by trial and error. Thanks!