Hello. I hope that this is the correct place to report this - I have found no other similar posts while searching and I think this definitely qualifies as a bug.
What Happened
I was creating a new subcategory for one of our categories in our Discourse Forum. I was distracted so I make two mistakes:
I forget to associate the subcategory to the parent category
I mix-up the subcategory Name and the subcategory Title. We have recently started using emojis in our subcategory Names, so the Name ended up as ‘fis-mec-i-staff’, which should have been the Title, and the Title ended up as ‘Staff ’.
Not noticing I had done this, I create the new category and it appears in our Forum as expected. However, when I try to enter the Category to delete it, I am stuck forever on this screen:
Since nothing else displays on the page, I can’t access the administration tools needed to delete the category. I’ve tried different browsers and they all get stuck on a blank screen on the Category page.
Possible Solution
Is there a way to delete a category from outside it? That would bypass having to load the Category page.
Thank you for your time. Any insight into this issue is greatly appreciated!
Edit: I was wondering if perhaps incorporating the emoji into the category title was what broke it, since it was converted to (potentially?) meta-characters like ‘%’.
Yes, that sounds like the cause of the problem. You could try going to your slug generation method site setting. If it is set to ascii, try temporarily changing the setting to encoded. That might allow you to access and edit the category.
Let us know if that doesn’t work. It will be possible to fix the issue from your site’s backend if it can’t be fixed through the user interface.
Being able to create a broken category sounds like a bug to me.
When you say ‘subcategory Title’, are you referring to the category-slug field?
Ah, yes, that’s what I mean. When I say ‘Title’ I mean ‘Slug’. I just thought the translation was slightly more literal.
Yes, that sounds like the cause of the problem. You could try going to your slug generation method site setting. If it is set to ascii , try temporarily changing the setting to encoded . That might allow you to access and edit the category.
Just changing the slug generation method to ‘encoded’ didn’t let me get into the Category, but it gave me an idea. When I tried getting into the broken category, the URL wasn’t being updated to the category URL, it just showed the main site’s. So I wondered if the problem was that the category name wasn’t being parsed correctly by the piece of code handled the URL generation, due to the meta-characters in the category’s slug. So I left the slug generation method ‘encoded’, and then tried a thing so weird, it might just work. I put an emoji into a URL address:
And… it worked. I got into the category and managed to delete it without incident via the user interface.
This was certainly a fun and… enlightening evening Thank you very much for your help!
’.
Thank you very much for your help!