# Bulk Actions \> Set Category results in error
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-actions-set-category-results-in-error/88694
**Category:** Support
**Tags:** bulk-actions
**Created:** [May 29, 2018, 8:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-actions-set-category-results-in-error/88694 "2018-05-29T20:55:06Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@allu](https://meta.discourse.org/u/allu)
#### Post date: [May 29, 2018, 8:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-actions-set-category-results-in-error/88694/1 "2018-05-29T20:55:06Z")
I am trying to move 30 topics from a subcategory to the parent category by multiple select and then applying Bulk Actions \> Set Category. This results in an error message “Sorry, an error has occurred.”. The category does not get updated. All the data was imported from phpBB. I am using v2.0.0.beta10 +71.
Any ideas?
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### Author:  [@tehspaceg](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tehspaceg)
#### Post date: [May 29, 2018, 9:12pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-actions-set-category-results-in-error/88694/2 "2018-05-29T21:12:18Z")
I ran into this when I imported my topics from NodeBB; there are probably topics with duplicate titles. There is a setting you can enable to allow duplicate topic titles, or you can manually rename them.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [May 29, 2018, 11:01pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-actions-set-category-results-in-error/88694/3 "2018-05-29T23:01:24Z")
You might learn more about the error by going to `/logs`
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### Author:  [@allu](https://meta.discourse.org/u/allu)
#### Post date: [May 31, 2018, 9:26am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-actions-set-category-results-in-error/88694/4 "2018-05-31T09:26:48Z")
> [@tehspaceg](#):
>
> there are probably topics with duplicate titles
Indeed, I could also verify this to be true in my case by querying the discourse db. I also tried allowing duplicate titles, like you suggested. Unfortunately, this did not resolve my issue. Nevertheless, yours is a great input, and I am likely to run into this down the line.
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> You might learn more about the error by going to `/logs`
Thanks for pointing out the obvious to me. Indeed, by looking at the logs (duh), I managed to identify my issue. Being a newbie, and not really knowing my way around discourse (yet), I would like to share how I proceeded. Maybe it will be of some help to others investigating similar problems.
My first issue was, that I wasn’t entirely sure what logs to look at. To find this out, I reproduced my error and then executed this command to find which logs under /var/discourse/shared/standalone/log have changed:
`find /var/discourse/shared/standalone/log -type f -mmin -1 -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n' | sort -r`
having then identified that the action was going on in production.log, i then tailed it to find this error:
`ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid (Validation failed: Title is too short (minimum is 15 characters), Title seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?)`
Next, I was interested to learn what my (imported) minimum topic length was. I executed the following query against postgres:
`select min(length(title)) from topics where archetype = 'regular' and length(title) < 15`
surprisingly, i turned out to be 1 (bye bye phpBB, I won’t miss you…) 🙄
Then, I went into Discourse admin, set min topic title length to 1, moved my posts, and then reset to 15.
Problem solved 😀
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [May 31, 2018, 9:49am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-actions-set-category-results-in-error/88694/5 "2018-05-31T09:49:03Z")
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### Author:  [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2024, 12:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-actions-set-category-results-in-error/88694/6 "2024-06-08T12:37:22Z")
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