Removing Uncategorized and migrating to a standard category

[steffahn (Frank Steffahn)]

I just saw that this change is already at the stage of “will become permanent soon. You will no longer be able to opt-out.”

Unfortunately, I can’t entirely confirm that this change is a

@lindsey

seamless and invisible change to your staff and community members

… as far as can tell, this e.g. changes that uncategorized posts now bear an “Uncategorized” badge. (Also “Uncategorized” used to have some special casing in the topic creation UI, that differs from just having a pre-selected entry in the dropdown.)

I could find this comment from a year ago

@sam

My recommendation here is

1. Delete both settings and delete the hidden setting uncategorized_category_id
2. Have a concept of default category (which we already do) - we already have default_composer_category
3. 'uncategorized` then is no longer a special concept, less stuff to reason about.
4. Have a theme component for people that must have a “category without a badge”

which mentions a theme component, and I agree a theme component would be a great solution to reduce the amount of change this introduces to the UI for users of a forum.

I couldn’t find any existing work regarding such a theme component though. Am I overlooking something? (I suppose I could try to roll my own^[1], but I would doubt that I’m the only person^[2] who would prefer/choose to just keep uncategorized topics work more like they used to, at least on the front-end/client side of things.)

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1. and also learn how to actually do that ↩︎

2. for context, I come from users.rust-lang.org & internals.rust-lang.org, which I help administer ↩︎