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