Not being able to delete topic blocks category deletion

We closed our politics category three years ago because it caused us so many headaches, and it has been hidden from our users since then.

I’d now like to delete the category, and I find that I first have to go through the step of deleting the topics in it (which I find bizarre in itself – why not just make it so if you delete a category it deletes all the topics within it?)

I’m following your steps above but when I get to this…

…I’m stuck because there is no gear icon or anything at all.

Any idea what’s going on here? Or how I get around it? Surely there’s a simpler way of deleting a category than this…

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Not having the button there would certainly make it more difficult. :slight_smile:

Could you try it in safe mode and see if there’s something obscuring the button?

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Awesome! This almost worked :rofl:

In safe mode, the cog was indeed there. I selected all the topics in one of the subcategories and clicked the button to delete them. It deleted them all except one (not counting the About topic), and when I try to delete that one it keeps saying: “Sorry. An error occurred.”

So I’m getting somewhere … but I still can’t delete the category because of that one rogue topic.

(I’ve tried logging out and logging back in again.)

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There may be some more detail in the /logs that may help, or possibly in the browser console when you try and perform the delete of that stray one.

(And just to triple-check, it’s definitely not the ‘About this category’ one?)

Hehe, definitely not the About category.

I tried deleting the topics in the other subcategory and I get the error message without it deleting any of them at all.

And nothing in the logs. I’m stumped.

Edit: With persistence I’ve arrived at the same result with the other subcategory. I have one topic left (plus ‘About this category’) and that last one just won’t delete.

And nothing in the browser console when you try and delete the stray one using the topic wrench?

Sorry, I don’t know what you mean by “browser console”.

If I go to that last topic and try to delete it under the wrench icon there I get a 502 error.

Sometimes there’s more info in the browser (though not always). If you right-click on the page, choose ‘Inspect’, and select the ‘Console’ tab in the panel that pops up. Then when you perform the action some error information can appear which can sometimes provide some extra clues.

If you had a lot of topics to delete, it may just need a moment to catch up with itself before you can ask it to do another.

I appreciate your time, thank you.

I’m left with 23 topics in the parent category and one in each of the subcategories that won’t delete.

Yes, there does appear to be information under Console about it but nothing that makes sense to a layman :sweat_smile:

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If you can expand it and take a screenshot or copy and paste it here someone may be able to decipher it. :crossed_fingers:

Ok, anyone know what any of this means? :sweat_smile:

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That would definitely be helpful. I did some mockups with this feature request on the other linked topic too – would be interested to hear what you think.

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