Migrating from uncategorized to "General"

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Hi all, I’m wondering about migrating away from #uncategorized as I see having a preseeded category imposes strong limitations.

Is there anything I’m missing in moving all topics over to a new category called " General", which we can have total control over configuring?

Thanks for any and all suggestions!

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There’s nothing to stop you from creating new categories. You can use the pre-seeded Water Cooler or create your own. I have a Random Thoughts category in my forum - plus many other categories/sub-categories. About the only time we use (and rarely) the uncategorized is if someone is unsure which topic to put their post in. A mod will move to the proper category shortly thereafter. General is a nice fitting catch-all category.
Set whatever properties you want when you make your new categories. :wink:

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There are settings either to rename “Uncategorised” or remove it altogether (with a warning about moving all topics out of it first).

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There is a site setting to disable it. That’s what I recommend.

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Since it is “preseeded” under Settings I will remove it. My understanding is I’ll need to move all of the topics first.

Good, admins have requested users choose a category as part of their post. I do see the appeal of uncategorized.

Yes, this is the reason our staff are requesting users simply choose a more fitting category (Projects or Classes) and choose from a proper tag (help-wanted).

Thanks for all of the feedback. Our site has been live for ~3 years. I’ve been wondering: How many posts does a category need to: continue as a category, be merged into another category, or be transformed into a group of tags.

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Mostly the recommendation is to go the other way. Don’t create a category until it’s painfully obvious that you need to add one.

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Truth is we never solidified this understanding… and I suppose too many trust levels are able to create categories (and tags). We have a lot of good information with redundant tagging (community vs communication vs communit5) making it basically impossible to actually index outside of search.

We do have a lot of different groups at work, so the idea is to clarify tags (many are actually assigned to chat integration) and move group-specific small categories into tags in either General as “Public” or our “Logged-In” only category or dedicate a group-based sub-category. I digress.

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Migration from uncategorized to General went well! All posts migrated. though I did find myself getting confused sometimes by the way Discourse refreshes itself when moving 30 posts at a time… probably not the proper way, but worked well enough.

Still having trouble with one category that is inaccessible for some strange reason, even though all of the posts show up. :thinking:

Converting categories with ~15 posts to tags turned out to be not painful at all when combined with reset bump date. :+1:

Disable did the trick! Great to have users choosing their categories, especially now that we’ve weeded it down to just a couple.

I’ll be interested to see if users choose to create more categories now, or perhaps turn to embracing tags instead. I still haven’t settled on the best method for restricting tags. Users (current 2+ trust) enjoy making up new tags, but it is really matter of clarifying our useful tagging system in a manner similar to how they are individually colored and displayed as sub-categories previously. Might split into an all new topic, but I’d love to add clearer descriptions and colors to our various tags / tag groups, much like… well… categories.

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