How to move many topics to a new category

Product Support

AI-generated summary

Seth_Godin shares a workaround for moving many topics to a new category in Discourse, noting that AI bots couldn’t help and the official suggestion (deleting the category) isn’t viable if content must be preserved. He explains that by clicking the list icon at the top of the window, users can select all topics on a page and change their category in bulk — repeating this for each page of results. He includes screenshots to illustrate the steps. JammyDodger adds that more bulk actions are available to moderators, pointing to a meta.discourse.org guide for further details. This thread is tagged with bulk-actions and falls under the Support category, aimed at helping users efficiently manage large-scale topic reorganization.

1

All three AI bots didn’t know the answer, and I almost spent an hour hacking it by hand. So, for the next person, here’s what I did:

  1. I needed to move a lot of stuff because some of the provided cateogies are hardwired for public access and you can’t change permissions. The only thing Discourse suggests is deleting the category, but you can’t do that if it’s not empty, and you don’t want to do that if the content needs to be saved.

  2. At the top of the window is the little icon for list

Screenshot 2024-03-01 at 5.29.35 PM
Screenshot 2024-03-01 at 5.29.35 PM262×108 2.46 KB

  1. When I clicked on that, I saw this
    Screenshot 2024-03-01 at 5.29.08 PM
    Screenshot 2024-03-01 at 5.29.08 PM518×140 6.98 KB

Select all, then you can change the category.

Screenshot 2024-03-01 at 5.56.43 PM
Screenshot 2024-03-01 at 5.56.43 PM436×102 4.65 KB

Repeat for every screen’s worth, done.

Thanks all.

2

There are a few more things you can do with the Bulk Actions as well (for any future travellers). You can find a bit more on that in Performing bulk actions as a moderator