Disclaimer: I am new to Discourse, just read about it for the first time yesterday.
I’ve noticed that every forum I’ve viewed that utilized Discourse uses the same terminology like “category” and “topic”. Is that because Discourse’s default terminology is unalterable or just because most people leave it as is? Thanks!
You can change category to apple, for example and topic to pear, or any other word you like.
But you might also want to ask why few forum owners do that. One reason is certainly that you need to figure out how to do it (work) and then do it (more work, though it’s easy) and then you need to keep an eye on these settings when you install plugins or update discourse to make sure that the wrong terminology doesn’t creep back into your forum (probably the biggest piece of work in the long term).
Another reason is that topic and category are not rsndom terms but make sense. You’ll find a number of topics on that if you search here on the forum for the various alternative terms you might want to use.
You can change it, as @tophee says (/admin/customize/text content – you can then search for the word you want to change or the name of the thing that contains it; it’s easier than you might guess).
I think that people don’t change it because those are words that are fairly universally understood. I worked with a client just yesterday, though, who was interested in changing “category” to “Chapter” (of their large organization). I couldn’t explain quite as cogently as @tophee did about why it’s a bad idea.
All text in Discourse can be edited via Admin, Customize.
Awesome, thanks for everything
Haha thanks again Jay
Thanks to you too Christoph