Is this a current/wanted/planned for feature? If you remove the “Uncategorized” category, will the category just default to the next first available category?
Just wondering what is behind that
If you want category to be required, turn on the required category setting.
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Since there seems to be “delete” happy, can you better explain what you are seeking? Are you looking to require a category or prevent topics from being created in Uncategorized? Are you looking for a solution that is for Members only or Staff as well?
Set “allow uncategorized topics” to false in the admin settings.
Do not attempt to remove or set security on the uncategorized category.
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Mostly I was wondering if I remove the “Uncategorized” category if I could make the first option be “Select a category” and if the poster does not do that it warns them that it s required. Currently the design for this is not very intuitive and many of my users have missed the category option entirely, so I find myself spending about half the time on the forum categorizing posts for my users.
I’m not finding the required category setting Jeff referred to, but I will keep looking
Thanks for at least telling me where it was 
To turn off ‘Uncategorized’, it says you need to categorize all existing posts. I think on the Meteor forums there might be many hundreds of thousands of these - is there a simple way to categorize them all?
That is not a problem, if you want to move all of the uncategorized topics to different category, let us know what needs moving and we can run the query.
Alternatively you could just give uncategorized a name. What is the driver for this change?
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Perhaps it doesn’t work the way I think it does, but I use categories to ignore a certain subset of posts by excluding them from my front page. When users don’t put in the effort to add a category, this filter doesn’t work anymore, and I would rather not ignore all uncategorized posts because often they can be pretty important.
If uncategorized is turned off, will users get some default category, or will they be required to select a category for new topics? That would be ideal.
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They will be required to choose one, if creating the topic from Latest or a non-category related page.
If they are on a category/latest page, that category will default (unless you use the keyboard shortcut for creating a category – which may be a bug, very low priority one though and hasn’t been reported to my knowledge).
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In my installation, the “allow uncategorized topics” is set to false (unchecked), but still, when I create a topic without selecting a category in the drop down, it still submitted the topic without notifying the user that he has to select a category. The topic appears in the list with blank text.
Is there an option to require a user to select a category from the list?
Yes, and allow uncategorized topics is the right setting for this.
Since this is your install, your’re most likely an admin, and admins are allowed to bypass most rules 
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Yes, that was it. Thank you.
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