Requiring a Category Before Posting

[Monty]

Is there a way to require the selection of a Category that is not “Uncategorized” before allowing someone to post? Too many posts go into Uncategorized and a lot of time is spent re-categorizing posts because some people just don’t bother.

[jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld)]

There is! Disabling the uncategorized category will require users to choose a category before they can start typing. To do so, go to site settings and uncheck allow uncategorized topics.

Users will see the following when trying to post:

[Monty]

Thanks for the quick answer!

Does this option still allow people to choose “Uncategorized” as the category before posting? If so, is there a way to prevent that so all posts are categorized?

[jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld)]

@Monty

Does this option still allow people to choose “Uncategorized” as the category before posting?

No it does not. If the site setting allow uncategorized topics is disabled, uncategorized is no longer an option for users or staff to select.

[Monty]

Great, that’s perfect, thanks!

[JammyDodger]

We also now have the default composer category admin setting, where you can set an existing one to be automatically filled in when the composer opens.