I am using discourse to document the parts and pieces of a particular recent bill and would like to use the existing category & contents for said bill to provide the initial populating of a category focused on the repeal of that bill. So category A with contents → category B Any thoughts on a good export/import for categories intra discourse? I have considered spinning up new discourse for the category B work on a subdomain, a different domain i.e. domain focused on repeal effort or site focused on the actual text of the repeal act. Also, related possibly: Has anyone done a sync setup from some category of a discourse to same /similar category on different discourse instance?

Do you want to create just subcategories or also the topics? You can export a category… Maybe it’s here: Administrative Bulk Operations

Thanks for that! It is useful but to answer your question, no subcategories, just one categories’ contents into another, once and done. I am trying to avoid duplicating manually but as I work on the manual approach I am reminded the topic title can’t be reused so I need to append/modify the title and change the contents to need text or placeholder. I am probably conflating things a bit as I get my head wrapped around things. Also, I am trying to avoid use some actual links that would help with articulating my needs given the highly political nature of the bill in question. :wink: Hopefully this helps. For individual topics without all the index and chapter stuff Category A Sec. 10101. Re-evaluation of thrifty food plan tagged Enrolled-Text Law-as-Amended | Sec. 10101. Re-evaluation of thrifty food plan tagged Law-as-Amended Impact | Sec. 10101. Re-evaluation of thrifty food plan tagged Impact Category B Draft | Sec. 10101. Re-evaluation of thrifty food plan tagged Draft Ready-to-Publish | Sec. 10101. Re-evaluation of thrifty food plan tagged Ready-to-Publish Published | Sec. 10101. Re-evaluation of thrifty food plan tagged Published (the text would be pubished on a seperate single focus site.)

[image] philh: I am reminded the topic title can’t be reused You can change that in the site settings: Allow duplicate topic titles

I could not see a workable path using some mix of the rails queries suggested by @pfaffman but his subcategories prompt was very useful. I was reticent to Allow duplicate topic titles as @Moin suggested but turns out the result was not confusing, at least to me, as I feared it would be. So… category A for the original bill, two subcategories for Law as Amended and Impact, create new mirrored tag groups for the two subcategories using existing tags, then create new topics with placeholder text for each of the Sections of the original bill. This part is rather brain numbing :persevering_face: given the there are 307 sections/topics in category A. 614 manually created topics, yikes. I thought turning off Allow duplicate topic titles would be best once we open the forum to users but I believe that would make any edits in the topics un-savable which won’t work with topics as wikis. In practice allowing duplicate titles may not create the confusion I fear but.. Does it makes sense to have warning that prompts the user to adjust the title instead of just allowing the topic save to proceed? Maybe something similar to: [Screenshot 2025-07-29 091408] But with different text and selecting OK saves the topic. “The topic title you are attempting to use has been used at least once before. Please consider revising the title or, the duplicate title is needed or desired, please proceed with the save.”

duplicate topic titles are fine, i have hundreds of them. The purpose of me allowing duplicate titles is helpful when searching the database, perhaps it’s not for you? I’m more wary of duplicate category names/slugs

[image] Ethsim2: I’m more wary of duplicate category names/slugs Not doing that for certain :slight_smile:

i’m guilty of duplicate subcategory names in different names of parent category :sweat_smile:

That would make my little brain explode. I did not know cat and sub cats can have duplicate titles, maybe duplicates with different slugs I suppose.

I might be wrong because i haven’t tried two parent categories with same name, from a quick look at my hundreds of categories. I think the slug is designed to be legible to a human or search engine indexer, if relevant :wink:

Structure and duplication of category contents intra discourse and between discourse sites

Product Support

Ethsim2 (Ethan ) July 27, 2025, 8:19am 5

yes i have to use this for those emails that repeat subject

Topic		Replies	Views
Could we check the duplicated topic title for the each category only? Product Support	6	1286	June 15, 2020
How can I duplicate a whole topic? Product Support	19	2333	September 4, 2025
Is it possible to set a topic under many categories? Feature	5	1368	May 19, 2022
Mirrored topic: same topic in two categories Feature	7	1335	March 14, 2023
Imported categories are not in parent category Product Support categories , spaces	4	251	December 5, 2025

Structure and duplication of category contents intra discourse and between discourse sites

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