As most know, when we create a category/sub-category, a special topic is created, “About the __ category”. I want to remove this description for some categories, not all. I know we can remove from all categories with a CSS tweak - that affects all pages.
We cannot Delete these special topics. We can Close them, and we can Unlist them - but even though they do not appear as topics, their content still shows as the category description. I think that’s an undestandable bug. IMO, a closed record should not be used for public content.
To get around this temporarily, I tried to delete the message content, but get an understandable error : “Post can’t be empty”. Empty whitespace (spacebar, newline, etc) is still considered “empty” - and I won’t try to get around that because this attempt at a solution is inelegant.
I tried using the admin area and Enter Description, hoping it would provide an option to remove the existing topic record, but no joy. Simply removing it is also inelegant - we lose the audit trail. I think Close and/or Unlist should be adequate - perhaps Archive as a more permanent (quoting thread here) “one foot in the grave”.
Some people might ask “Why would you want to do this?” I have topic/descriptions for many categories and sub-categories. One of our categories has a Lot of sub-categories. I created a few and then gave up the time consuming effort of entering a unique description for all. I don’t want to have to manually support topics on all of them. I wanted to remove the few About topics that I created under this category but I found that the topics and their descriptions will not go away.
I have not enabled the Permanent Delete option but if that’s the answer for this rare operation, I’ll do it.
Thanks!
