# Archive categories
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/archive-categories/26319
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [March 14, 2015, 9:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archive-categories/26319 "2015-03-14T09:04:33Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Maestra\_Powers](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Maestra_Powers)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2015, 9:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archive-categories/26319/1 "2015-03-14T09:04:33Z")
I have a lot of categories on [my forum](http://forum.red-squadron.ru/), some of them are active, some are dead. I agree with @codinghorror that there’s shouldn’t be too many categories, specially when there’s dead categories mixed with alive together - it creates a meeting on graveyard atmosphere, noone wants to go there. But I don’t want to delete old categories, it’s a history of my community. My forum is about games, so people like to go back time to time, read old posts, see screenshots with old victories and nostalgy. So what I’m planning to do now is to create another Discourse forum on `old` subdomain and move old categories there manually. :sadpanda:
It would be awesome if there would be easier way to move dead categories from main categories page where users can access and read old stuff. Maybe by collapsing them in some sort of spoiler? And it would be even more awesome if people could resurrect old category from archive by starting an activity there. Maybe someone could make a plugin for this?
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2015, 9:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archive-categories/26319/2 "2015-03-14T09:16:26Z")
This is the basic idea behind “archive topic” but we have not fully fleshed it out.
You could see a similar concept at the category level, “archive category”.
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2015, 10:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archive-categories/26319/3 "2015-03-14T10:21:07Z")
You can achieve this with permissions, only allow read to general public on these categories
You can also go through and archive old topics
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### Author:  [@Maestra\_Powers](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Maestra_Powers)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2015, 10:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archive-categories/26319/4 "2015-03-14T10:21:43Z")
Yea, but I can’t place there categories that already have subcategories. Some of them have like 5 subcategories and merging them all in one will create a mess. And also will ruin “nostalgy effect” for users because category wouldn’t look as it use to be.
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### Author:  [@Maestra\_Powers](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Maestra_Powers)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2015, 10:31am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archive-categories/26319/5 "2015-03-14T10:31:34Z")
> [@sam](#):
>
> You can achieve this with permissions, only allow read to general public on these categories
This still won’t clear visual mess that I have right now. Dunno… I like solution with second forum better for now, but I will have to figure out how to move categories between DBs.
I also have another idea for a “crutch” - use JS to reorder categories page and hide some categories under a collapsable div. But that means to rebake page each time it has been loaded, so I don’t like this aproach.
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### Author:  [@Meteor0id](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Meteor0id)
#### Post date: [September 30, 2021, 3:13pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archive-categories/26319/6 "2021-09-30T15:13:35Z")
> [@sam](#):
>
> You can achieve this with permissions, only allow read to general public on these categories
Does that also prevent likes, post edits and wiki edits like topic archiving would? I assume not.
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### Author:  [@hellekin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/hellekin)
#### Post date: [May 11, 2022, 9:01pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/archive-categories/26319/7 "2022-05-11T21:01:20Z")
One should be aware that bulk actions on topics can be used in a category to archive all topics at once, reducing the required work to archive a category. Then the procedure would be:
For each (sub-)category: select all topics, archive them, then edit the category security settings and reduce all to read.