Not a bad idea, except that it would lose the original categories.
The original category is retained in the edit history:
So all you would have to do is click the revert button from the edit history:
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You canāt, at least not easily. Hereās why:
You would need the following info:
- the user id
- the date in UTC the bulk deletion happened
- the post ID of each deleted topicās OP
- advanced knowledge of using the rails console and/or psql directly to run a very advanced SQL query as you need to clear the deleted_at field on both the topic itself and the post that is the OP of the topic.
And please donāt ask why I know thisā¦
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Iām not sure how many topics youāre dealing with, but I was thinking of a semi-manageable amount where you could glance down a topic list with the bulk select open and tick any you wanted to move to a particular category (using a mix of just knowing or glancing at the edit history as Simon suggests for any that you werenāt sure of). Repeat for the next.
Itās a little manual though, so may be too fiddly depending on the amount of topics or categories there were.
Thanks for the additional replies.
There are definitely far too many topics to manually revert the revisions. It looks like the lesser of the evil options will be to open all of the deleted topics and manually click the un-delete button (which unfortunately is located at the end of the variable length original post, so requires scrolling to search for the end of each topic and then expanding the ā¦ menu to reveal the un-delete button).
Iām sure itās quite a process behind the scenes. But I really donāt understand why a UI bulk un-delete action couldnāt be added if there is already bulk deletion implemented plus the listings of the deleted topics that are already available with a bulk selector.
That would be a feature request. It does not exist at the moment. 
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You could maybe add a tag for each of the previous categories for those topics (one tag per category) and add a tag with the original category to each topic, then use that tag to figure out where topics go later (and remove the original category tag when moving each topic)
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Thanks @hello-smile6 for the reply. Reverting to the previous revision should also revert the category right? The main difficulty is reverting them in bulk, whereas unlisted topics can be re-listed in bulk.
You can recategorise using bulk actions too. Iām not sure what your category set up is like, but I would have thought you could scan down a topic list and move a solid chunk back to where they came from just by knowing what category they should be in?
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Hmm I donāt think so. The topics were originally scattered across at least 5 different categories, and even if I tagged them or somehow knew the original category it would still require manually selecting each topic individually in order to bulk re-categorize all the ones that should go in a specific category.
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Thatās cool. A lot depends on your setup, so it may not work for everyone, or in every case.
As a cheeky extra top tip FWIW, you can use the shift+select trick to grab runs of sequential ones, which can sometimes make it easier than ticking each individually.
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