I can’t find an area for deleting channels, deleting categories, shouldn’t that be in the settings? And what’s in my settings, a bunch of useless customization settings, so irrelevant, and such an important function (edit, add, delete categories, channels) function, I searched for 30 minutes and couldn’t find it, I’ve used some forum software, WordPress, Flarum, discuz, etc., but discourse is the first one that I can’t find the edit category and delete channel area. Delete Channels, it’s horrible!
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Hi @尔德_王 I’m sorry your experience has been challenging.
I know the channels can be a bit tricky to navigate at first. But it’s actually quite easy to manage the channels and categories if you are an admin. For channels, simply go to the channel and click the channel name and it will give you the channel settings (you can delete the channel at the bottom). For categories, go to the category you want to edit/ remove, and click the admin wrench icon in the top right corner to get the catergory admin settings. From there you can delete the category witth the button at the bottom of the category settings screen.
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You are not the only one with that problem. I was also confused that configuring channels, tags and categories is not located in the admin area like for example badges are.
While you can also only customize groups from the groups page, there is at least a link in the admin area taking you to the group page.
Maybe something like this should be added for the others as well.
If you haven’t done it before, it’s also worth looking at the topics in the Site Management category. At the beginning, the getting-started tag, which shows the most helpful topics, is very helpful.
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I can’t find the area to delete “Channels” and when I try to delete a category it tells me “There are channels in this category that can’t be deleted.”
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It’s really irritating, building Discourse is not like other forums, get a zip and install it, it took me three days to install Discourse, during which time I had to solve China’s network problems, especially docker’s network problems, and all kinds of errors, and then the smtp server’s errors, and when I installed it today after a lot of hard work, I even I couldn’t even find a place to delete the channel. Oh my god, it’s like climbing a mountain really hard, and when you get to the top, you realize that your mountain is the lowest, and there are even higher peaks, which is very frustrating and annoying!
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Here is a guide about deleting a category. It also explains that you have to delete all topics or move them to a different category.
To delete a channel click the channel title:
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Thank you very much for your help@Moin, I almost can’t find any keywords on the Chinese internet about the way to configure discourse, who can think of it? There is also a click there
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If that’s how you really feel then maybe you should use a different software. Not trying to be facetious; if there are better tools for you out there then you should consider those.
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However, if I can’t find any forum software that is more beautiful than Discourse and as full-featured as it is, but the process of building and configuring it was a disaster, I can’t ask for anything, after all Discourse is free and open-source, but after I went through all the trouble of building it, I realized that I couldn’t even configure the categories and channels, and that’s a very maddening thing!
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This is a really good point worth us thinking about. 
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This should really think about it, I hope that your forum software can become a forum software used by people all over the world, at least he has been qualified to do so, but there is still a lot of English within the settings, there is no Chinese configuration video, even if there is no such thing, I feel that will be the key to the configuration and other settings, the control panel to do the same as the rest of the forum, which allows administrators to quickly get started, rather than using the mouse! Click little by little, try to click where there is a reaction
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Thank you for these honest comments @尔德_王 - this kind of feedback is very valuable to us because it represents an unfiltered, new user viewpoint that is generally less influenced by pre-existing bias or previous knowledge of the platform itself. New admin experience is especially useful to understand expectations for a new forum experience.
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I agree with this 
However, Discourse is most certainly a [1] learning curve compared to other forum software out there.
I remember that when I first used Discourse I couldn’t figure out how to create a category hint hint, I was also looking in settings instead of the categories page. Which personally I found a bit odd as 99% of settings / site management is where you’d expect categories and a few other things are just dotted around so to speak.
There was this topic a couple of years ago discussing admin ‘tribulations’. Although I have to admit that the new admin settings layout has made navigating settings a lot easier except that I keep searching for settings in the wrong ‘filter’ example
Once you get used to managing Discourse I’m convinced you’ll like it. Personally I love it and I’d never look back.
sometimes a steep one ↩︎
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I’m sorry to hear that Chinese search translation is difficult. If you post your Discourse-related questions here instead, people from the community are generally quite helpful and of course our Team is also here to assist if necessary. 
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I think the first step to globalization is localization. Your forum software is very popular, whether it is Chinese or American. I hope you can recruit some people who are proficient in Chinese and English to do localization translation. This is very important. Even if you don’t provide compensation, there will still be people helping you with translation work. I’m confused when I look at the “machine translation” in the control backend. I don’t quite understand the function of some options.
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You raise a bunch of valid points and I’m confident we can improve those areas in time.
I’m also sure better translations would be a good help, as you suggest.
Just in case you’re interested, or you know those who would be, we already use a translation service where you could help out, in case we’re missing Chinese translations:
All help is very appreciated and you’ll save others from going through the same struggles! 
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Hello @尔德_王,
Welcome to our community! 
I know how frustrating it can be to fight with the UX of a software product sometimes. Also due to our open source nature it can be really hard, specially for non-tech people to set a personal self-hosted instance.
The beauty of Discourse for me lies in the community, if you feel like you’re struggling don’t hesitate to open a topic about it here on Meta, people will show up really fast.
When you have free time there are many great topics in Documentation covering our features as well.
Thank you for your feedback.
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What you said is quite right. I found many enthusiastic people here to help me. My proposal has also received official attention. I think it is very well written. This kind of community atmosphere is also very good. Although it took me three days to build discourse on my own server, I think it was worth it
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@尔德_王 when thing that pleasantly surprised me was how good our bot was at answering these types of questions (reload/ robot on top), for example:
I added you to bot_testers group here, feel free to have a play and see if it helps you.
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