Is there a way to convert categories into tags?

[chrisc (Chris Croome)]

A Discourse forum I help manage wants to radically reorganise the current categories — basically archive or delete the old ones and create new ones.

I’m hoping there is a way we can preserve the metadata that the old category structure contains — is there a way to convert categories into tags?

There was a mention of categories becoming tags when tags were first introduced in 2016 but I haven’t been able to find a method for doing this.

Can all threads in a category be selected, a tag added to them and then the category be deleted?

Sorry If this is silly question but I despite references on this forum to Bulk Actions I haven’t been able to work out how to find the Bulk Actions admin page or if what I want to do can be done and if so how?

I’d be happy doing it via the CLI if that is the only option.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Thanks!

[Moin]

I think this might help:

@Discourse

Bulk Tag All Topics Within a Category

---

Template: rake tags:bulk_tag_category["<tag>|<tag>",<category_id>]
This would be particularly useful when trying to convert a category to a tag.

First, use the following rake task to find the relevant category ID.

rake categories:list

Tag all topics of the category you specify. In this example, you would be tagging all topics in the category with an ID of 6 with the “support” tag. this will remove all other tags from each topic.

rake tags:bulk_tag_category["support",6]

Append all topics of the category you specify. In this example, you would be adding the “support” tag to all topics in the category with an ID of 6, while keeping existing tags.

rake tags:bulk_tag_category["support",6,true]

And after tagging them, you probably want to move them to another category because you cannot delete categories containing posts.

@Discourse

Move all topics from one category to another

---

Find the category IDs with the following rake task:

rake categories:list

The first value should be the starting category ID. The second value should be the destination category ID.

rake categories:move_topics[15,6]

Rails Console Script

cat_from_id = XX # Category to move topics from 
cat_to_id = XX  # Category to move topics to 
Topic.where(category_id: cat_from_id).update_all(category_id: cat_to_id)
Category.update_stats
CategoryTagStat.update_topic_counts

Using Performing bulk actions as a moderator might work too, but “select all” only selects all topics that were loaded. So, depending on the number of topics, it can still take a while.