Tag Icons suddenly converting underscores to dashes in slugs, breaking the icon

AI-generated summary

AquaL1te reports that Tag Icons have recently stopped displaying correctly in topics and tag overviews, although they still appear correctly in the sidebar. This issue affects tags configured with underscores in their names, such as strategic_access, and began occurring after updates to the theme component and Discourse core.

After gilles suggested a potential plugin conflict, Lilly identified the root cause. Lilly deduced that the icons were missing for tags containing underscores and pinpointed a specific commit in the discourse-tag-icons repository that altered how slugs are handled. This change converted underscores (_) to dashes (-) in the generated slugs, causing a mismatch between the tag configuration and the rendered elements. Lilly confirmed via testing that manually updating the tag slugs in the theme component from underscores to dashes resolves the issue for topics, though it requires careful management of the component settings.

AquaL1te noted that while changing strategic_access to strategic-access fixes the icon in topics, it breaks the display in the sidebar, creating an unpredictable user experience. Questioning why a theme component would alter core slug behavior, AquaL1te expressed frustration over the lack of a seamless fix and the necessity of renaming tags or component entries to maintain functionality. Despite multiple follow-up requests for a solution or workaround (10, 9), no definitive patch was provided in the thread, leading the user to conclude they would have to modify their tags to make the icons work again (10).

I’ve set the following, and that worked really well. But since a few weeks it doesn’t work well anymore.

So these tags should all look like below, and they do, in the sidebar, but not in topics.

So as you can see, it works well in the sidebar, but then when I check topics and the tag overview.

Not all tags get the >> icon.

How can I fix this or troubleshoot this better?

There are more tag icons that are missing, but are configured with one in the theme component and it worked fine in the past.

I’m using the latest Discourse release (2026.5.0-latest.1 ( 4f17eef310 ) and the latest version of this theme component.

It works on my end, so I think there’s a conflict with another component or plugin. Try disabling the components to see which one is causing the conflict.

Do you have a URL to your forum? Maybe I can compare some things. Maybe the amount of tags or something like that triggers it. Because 95% of my tags work fine. I can try disabling components, but I need more time for that.

without installing this component and testing, i’m going to just guess that it is the _ underscore in the tag names. looks like all the tags that have underscores are not showing their icons.

Screenshot 2026-05-20 at 2.29.00 AM

i’m thinking this commit reconfigured your tag slugs that have underscores _ to dashes -

https://github.com/discourse/discourse-tag-icons/commit/46ee338ae4fb7b316e25501744e779f5f96c48e9

edit: testing now and indeed this is the case - if you change the tag slugs in this component from underscore to dash (don’t change the tag names themselves), it should work again.

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That’s a strange commit, why would a component need to change that behavior? That makes things unpredictable. When I change strategic_access to strategic-access in the theme component it works in topics, but then breaks in the sidepanel.

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This issue is still present, is there a solution or temporary workaround for this? Or just sit back and wait for the fix? Changing the labels is not really something I want to do.

Anyone? :face_with_peeking_eye: I just would like to get this functionality back.

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I guess I just have to change my tags to make things work again. :melting_face: