I can’t figure out for the life of me how to delete the “Staff” category.
Have tried deleting all of the topics however 4 of them remain in the list. When I go to the Edit screen, it says cannot delete as it has 3 topics.
Can someone guide me in the right direction?
Thanks!
Is there a specific reason you want to delete it?
To my knowledge, that category is also used to upload images that may be needed to brand and style the ui itself.
Deleting this built-in category is not supported, or recommended.
Ok, I’m not even going to ask why. Having a message to this effect in the UI would be really helpful. Right now it says two misleading things:
“Warning: This category is a pre-seeded category and the security settings cannot be edited. If you do not wish to use this category, delete it instead of repurposing it.”
“Can’t delete this category because it has 3 topics.”
Mainly because the terms of service, privacy policy, and guidelines / faq are in the Staff category and required for all sites. Note the count of topics I just referred to : three.
So, how to hide Staff Category?
Or change security, I don’t want “moderators” see this page. Is it possible to change security level, just only admin to see it?
thanks
You can do that by editing the security settings like you would any category. Go to the category you wish to edit, click the “edit” button in the upper right corner, go to the security tab, click “edit permissions”, and remove everything except admins.
I’d like to add another group with access, but you can’t manually change security settings for the Staff category.
Is it still not recommended or supported to delete the category and replace it with another manually created Staff category?
It can’t be deleted. If you want an area for staff discussion, rather than for staff-only access to critical things, create a new category for that purpose.
I’m able to delete it fine in 2.2.1. Hence why I’m asking if it’s still not recommended, and if there could be any bad consequences from doing so.
We’ve said repeatedly it’s not a good idea. You’re on your own.
(And where is your faq, terms of service, and privacy policy now? Just gone forever?)
I moved them all to the replacement staff folder whose security settings I can customise. As far as I can tell the FAQ, TOS etc all still work. Their content is taken, live, from the topics in the replacement staff folder.
Rather than hiding the Staff folder from mods I want to open it to all our board members, not all of whom are active mods. Hard coding the security settings doesn’t seem like it serves much of a purpose to me.
What will you do in the future if code fails to build because an update tries to write an object to a built-in category which you’ve deleted against the advice of the developers?
Well that’s what I’m trying to ascertain! I asked if the advice in posts from three years ago is still good advice, when the software itself says the Staff category can be deleted. Why would the software suggest deleting it in favour of another category which we can change the security settings of, if doing so would be so disastrous?
Okay, it’s clear that deleting the category is still not recommended. I’ll check if there’s been a feature request to unlock its security settings, or else start one.
It is possible it will work, you can try it. But deviate from well considered defaults at your own peril — 99% of Discourse sites should have a private staff category for internal matters.
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