By this, do you mean unchecking the “Allow uncategorized topics” site setting?
If so, then that is how Arduino Forum is (and always has been) configured.
Please note that, with the exception of “Reorder Categories” (which we have already specified is not very important), I have verified that the fault can be reproduced by the instructions I provided on try.discourse.org. So Arduino Forum is not directly relevant to this conversation. From what I can tell as a normal user, the “Allow uncategorized topics” site setting is disabled on try.discourse.org.
The problem reported here is that the Uncategorized category is exposed in the user interface on forums which have that category disabled via the “Allow uncategorized topics” site setting.
That is fine with me.
As someone who has struggled for years to get users to choose an appropriate category for their topics, I can understand why some forum operators would find it useful to have a feature that allows users the option of skipping picking a category. However, I don’t have any interest in using the “Allow uncategorized topics” feature on my forum so the removal of the feature would not affect me personally.
Since I don’t have any experience using the “Allow uncategorized topics” feature, I can’t comment on the relative merits of the feature vs. just using a normal category as you propose.
I think it is a good idea to talk to someone who uses the feature to understand whether it is truly needed; I just don’t happen to be that person.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this. I would like to understand though.
Are you offering some form of assistance with the categorization of Arduino Forum?
If you are looking at Arduino Forum, something that might cause confusion is that we do actually have a category named “Uncategorized”. However, this is a normal category that just happens to have that name, not the special category that is provided by the “Allow uncategorized topics” site setting. Our “Uncategorized” category actually has a completely opposite purpose from the “Allow uncategorized topics” feature. It isn’t in any way relevant to the subject of this bug report, but in case you are interested in why we did that, it is explained here.