Maybe the setting names and descriptions can be improved. Auto Publish marks posts to be published on Discourse. All it does is pre-check the ‘Publish post to Discourse’ checkbox that is found on the post edit page. If they wish, an author can uncheck the checkbox before publishing a post. I’m not sure that this setting is very helpful, but I’m wary of removing settings that people may be using.
Force Publish forces all posts to be published to Discourse, it cannot be overridden. That setting was added to help a site where authors were sometimes unchecking the ‘Publish post to Discourse’ checkbox. There is a warning about it in the setting’s description. Checking both Auto Publish and Force Publish doesn’t cause any kind of error. If that is done, the Force Publish setting will be applied.
There are a few cases on the Settings pages where contradictory settings are available, for example the Use Discourse Comments and the Link to Comments Without Displaying Them settings. If someone attempts to enable both settings, a warning is displayed saying that both settings cannot be enabled. A dropdown menu would be a better alternative here.
I like the idea of being able to map WordPress categories to Discourse categories.