Viktor09 is trying to delete a long-hidden “politics” category but is blocked because they must first delete all topics within it — a process they find unnecessarily cumbersome. They report that the gear icon for bulk deletion is missing in normal mode but appears in safe mode. While most topics delete successfully, one topic in each subcategory fails with a “Sorry. An error occurred” message and a 502 error when attempting deletion via the topic wrench. JammyDodger suggests checking the browser console for error details, which Viktor09 does, but the output is cryptic. Despite multiple attempts and checking logs, the issue persists, leaving 23 topics in the parent category and one stubborn topic per subcategory. bloomexperiment agrees that automatic topic deletion upon category deletion would be a helpful improvement and references mockups for such a feature in a related topic.
We closed our politics category three years ago because it caused us so many headaches, and it has been hidden from our users since then.
I’d now like to delete the category, and I find that I first have to go through the step of deleting the topics in it (which I find bizarre in itself – why not just make it so if you delete a category it deletes all the topics within it?)
I’m following your steps above but when I get to this…
…I’m stuck because there is no gear icon or anything at all.
In safe mode, the cog was indeed there. I selected all the topics in one of the subcategories and clicked the button to delete them. It deleted them all except one (not counting the About topic), and when I try to delete that one it keeps saying: “Sorry. An error occurred.”
So I’m getting somewhere … but I still can’t delete the category because of that one rogue topic.
(I’ve tried logging out and logging back in again.)
I tried deleting the topics in the other subcategory and I get the error message without it deleting any of them at all.
And nothing in the logs. I’m stumped.
Edit: With persistence I’ve arrived at the same result with the other subcategory. I have one topic left (plus ‘About this category’) and that last one just won’t delete.
Sometimes there’s more info in the browser (though not always). If you right-click on the page, choose ‘Inspect’, and select the ‘Console’ tab in the panel that pops up. Then when you perform the action some error information can appear which can sometimes provide some extra clues.
If you had a lot of topics to delete, it may just need a moment to catch up with itself before you can ask it to do another.
That would definitely be helpful. I did some mockups with this feature request on the other linked topic too – would be interested to hear what you think.
