I would like to NOT show the Manufacturer on the product pages - or anywhere else on the customer side, but I need them on for background / admin reasons (filtering and reports)
How can I do this ? Is there a setting or does it have to be coded somewhere ?
Ok, I looked through the code and you can prevent them from showing up when viewing a product by setting the manufacturer to "un-published". I do not know what other effects that might have for how you intend to use them, though the docs make it sound like it should only affect the frontend: https://docs.nopcommerce.com/en/running-your-store/catalog/manufacturers.html
Select the Published checkbox, to enable the manufacturer to be visible in the public store.
It's also easy to edit the cshtml files. For example, in Nop.Web / Views / Product / ProductTemplate.Simple.cshtml you would simply comment out this line: