The discussion revolves around identifying and handling the “About the category” post when deleting a category and its topics. ryancey wants to prevent their script from attempting to delete the “About the category” post and instead directly delete the category. justin explains that this post is required as the category description and can coexist with a deleted category. ryancey seeks a way to differentiate the “About the category” post from others to avoid script errors. justin suggests comparing the category topic ID to the topic ID to exclude the “About the category” post.
I auto-create a category along with some object in my application.
Thus, when my user want to delete its object, I want to also delete the category. But before deleting a category, I must delete all the topics in it, and we can’t delete the About the category topic.
Even if deleting the category is possible at this point (with only this topic in it), I’d like a way to not try to delete the About post, and directly try to delete the category instead.
Does this topic has some kind of flag? Should I rely on the fact that it is created by the system user (because it is — through my API client)?
You should be able to delete a category with the About the category topic still in existence. All other topics need to be deleted. The about topic needs to exist as it serves as the category description.
I know that the category can be deleted, I’d just like my script to not worry when it tries to delete all topics and stumble upon About this category, or better, that it doesn’t try to delete it. Right now I can’t differentiate wether a failed topic deletion is to be considered as a problem or just normal because it’s the About topic
