In a Support thread, SouperC explains that during Discourse setup, they renamed the default “uncategorized” category to “General Karting” — but this caused topics to appear without any visible category label on topic lists. Seeking a fix, itsbhanusharma suggests a workaround involving renaming and moving posts, while HAWK confirms mass-moving posts is safe and clarifies there’s no true “default” category — though frequently used categories appear at the top of dropdowns. SouperC asks if “General Karting” can become the default; HAWK explains it can’t be set as default but can be prioritized. SouperC reiterates the goal: to display “General Karting” as the category label without creating a new category. HAWK advises creating a new “General Karting”, moving posts, then disabling “uncategorized”. SouperC clarifies the issue stems from renaming “uncategorized” at setup, causing the label to disappear. HAWK directs them back to their earlier suggestion. Finally, featheredtoast offers a simpler fix: unchecking “suppress uncategorized badge” in admin settings. SouperC confirms this worked — “General Karting” now appears as the category label, and by allowing uncategorized posts, it effectively becomes the default for new topics.
When I installed Discourse originally (Oct 16), I renamed the uncategorized category to “General Karting”
The result is that on our homepage, the category for those topics shows as unlisted.
My desired outcome is for the topics here that are uncategorized to appear with a category of “general karting”. Any suggestions on how to tackle this?
I might be overthinking this here, but I don’t want to mess up what we have.
Maybe a hacky solution but you can first rename the current General karting category to say “karting gen”
then make a new category by the name General Karting and move over all the posts to that new category? (I don’t know a smart way to do it so It seems like a bad idea)
Then rebrand the karting gen as uncategorized once again.
Yeah, you can mass move everything out of Uncategorized into a new category no problem at all.
What is your concern (want to make sure I’m not misunderstanding you here)?
Hi @HAWK!
So can I make that category the default for posts?
Essentially dropping “uncategorized”?
Not exactly. There is no ‘default’ category option as such, but the category that is used most frequently will be at the top of the category selection dropdown.
Ah.
So is there a way I can make “General Karting” appear under the category column, without creating a new category and moving the topics?
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. If General Karting doesn’t already exist you will need to create it, move all the posts to it and then disallow Uncategorized.
I renamed the “uncategorized” category as general karting at setup. The result of which is that it doesn’t show a category name under the topic list. Like in the screenshot.
With that in mind I’m looking to get those topics appear under a category of general karting on the latest, unread, top etc pages.
Right, so you need to follow my steps here.
Do you mean that you want the “uncategorized” label to appear next to the topics on the topic list page? Unchecking suppress uncategorized badge in the admin settings may be what you’re asking for.
Don’t show the badge for uncategorized topics in topic lists.
Thanks Jeff, that worked perfectly. Now the “general karting” label appears on the various pages and by allowing uncategorized posts, the “general karting” is now the default category for new posts.
