I’m creating a community who will have 1000s of topics, it’s not a good idea to create 1000s of categories, so better to make it by tags.
is there any way i can hide the category selection, and make the users only use tags?
also, can i make the tags mandatory? the users cannot post unless at least 1 tag selected.
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Why should you hide categories? Just don’t use them.
You can force tags at category settings, but the issue is you have to educate users then. I think it is better to let them post freely and after that tag topics by moderators AND same time do some education.
Old users will learn really fast and the biggest issue will be too keen using of tags 
But you defenetly don’t want slow down new ones creating any barricades.
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Educating them to use the tags or what meant with this? if i force them to use the tags, a warning message will appear, and they will select a tag automatically without any issues. if this what you mean.
They don’t know how to use tags. Discourse is very rare case where tags are used as should. When an user is unsure or warning message is somehow unfamiliar they will bale out.
And there is another point too: categories like uncategorized or general nowadays. It is bad policy to force choosing a category. If an user doesn’t want or know how to choose a category it is better to let them publish and fix that later. The worst scenario is that user will click backspace because he/she/it is afraid to choose perhaps wrong category.
Categories, tags… no differences.
What is the main reason force an user to do something: lazy moderators But users create a forum and its content, not moderatos — that’s why we have to go users first.
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I disagree. Just have a default category. I think that’s what’s happening with General. The uncategories un-category is very confusing because it doesn’t behave like a category.
I think what to do here is have everything go in General and use tag settings to enforce choosing a tag. Of course choosing one of thousands of tags will be a nightmare, which makes your claim of it being "bad policy to force choosing . . . " absolutely true. Having to select among thousands of tags in order to post is a sure way to keep people from posting.
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You actually agree now Using default category (I referred to those; uncategorized or general) we will let publish without force to choose category.
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I’m posting a link to a news, how hard is to select news tag?
discourse has the search thing, so you don’t need to scroll looking for thousands of tags, only type it.
Obviously it is so hard you considering to use mandatory tags
This topic has zero tags.
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It’s easy if you have a dozen tags. It’s hard if you have thousands. Maybe your first message is using the word “topics” in the formal Discourse sense of topics, which are connected to exactly one category and can have multiple tags. I thought that you meant it in the vernacular sense of “catefgories of things to talk about” (which would requite “1000s of categories”), as it doesn’t make much sense to me otherwise.
If you are going to have 1000s of tags and expect someone to choose the right one of those thousands, then it will be hard for a user to do that.
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