Bulk Actions Available to Moderators

[SaraDev (Sara Devlaeminck)]

This is a reference guide that will describe what types of bulk actions are available for moderators and site admins to perform on topics through the Discourse UI.

Bulk actions in Discourse are operations that you can perform on multiple topics at once. These actions are particularly useful when you need to manage or moderate a large number of topics.

Bulk Actions

To perform bulk actions, you will first need to select the topics you want to edit.

This can be done by clicking the hamburger menu icon next to any list of “Topics”, and then selecting topics by using the checkboxes that will appear to the left of topics after clicking this icon.

You can also select all topics with the Select All button, or clear all topics from your selection with the Clear All button.

Note that the Select All button will select all topics from your current view of topics, not necessarily all topics on the site.

If you’re looking to perform bulk actions on all topics within a specific category or tag, you can easily do so by first navigating to that category or tag, and then clicking “Select All”.

Once you’ve selected the topics you want to edit, you can then click the gear wheel icon () to bring up the bulk actions menu.

From here, you can perform a variety of bulk actions on the topics you’ve selected.

Before performing any bulk actions, make sure you’ve selected the intended number of topics.

Below is a description of all the actions you can perform through this menu:

• Set Category: Moves all topics to a different category.
• Close Topics: Marks all topics as Closed all topics.
• Archive Topics: Marks all topics as Archived all topics.
• Notifications: Sets your personal notification level (watching, tracking, normal, muted) for all topics. Does not impact the notification level of topics for other users.
• Unlist Topics: Marks all topics as Unlisted all topics.
• Reset Bump Dates: Resets the Bump Date for all topics.
• Replace Tags: Replaces all existing tags on topics with selected new tags.
• Append Tags: Adds additional tags to topics, and keeps any existing tags the topics already have.
• Remove All Tags: Removes all tags from topics.
• Delete Topics: Destructive Task - Deletes all selected topics.
• Assign Topics: (Requires Discourse Assign) Assigns all topics to an individual user.
• Unassign Topics: (Requires Discourse Assign) Unassigns any topics that are currently assigned to users.

Related Topics

Administrative Bulk Operations

Below you will find a collection of bulk operations that can be initiated from the command line. You will need SSH access, so if you are a hosted customer, you will need to contact the Discourse team about running these commands. This topic is a wiki, so feel free to add or improve anything relevant. Before working with the console it is extremely important that you have a recent backup. Mistakes can always happen! First thing to do is enter your site’s container: cd /var/discou…

[wellbing-go]

That is very helpful to me.

[pixelDust]

This is excellent, but do you know why the Gear icon (that allows you to actually perform functions on selected topics) wouldn’t show up?

At first I thought this could be a problem with our site’s CSS, but even when I turn off all page styles or dig through the source code, I see no editing options to speak of. Is there an admin setting we need to change? We just upgraded (to 3.2.0.beta1-dev) but the problem persists

[JammyDodger]

It should show up as soon as you select at least one topic.

If it doesn’t, you could try safe mode and see if it’s a stray theme or theme component interfering.

[hello-smile6 (9pfs)]

@SaraDev

Set Category: Moves all topics to a different category.

Can TL3 users use that bulk action?

[JammyDodger]

I don’t believe TL3 have the bulk action button, so they would not.