Judging from the above quote, the topic is supposed to show up but I don’t think it should trigger a 404 when an admin clicks on it.
Also, I’m seeing now that if allow_uncategorized_topics is unchecked:
I believe that categories page is heavily cached, so you may need to wait a day or two (or clear the cache) for it to disappear.
I agree, I do not think this is a bug but a caching issue, categories page is heavily cached.
I think the bug is that we have the allow_uncategorized_topics option in the first place, this option is hack soup.
Would it be better to leave it on always and have an Edit Category option to hide the category? We need that anyway for 1.4
I think the best approach is to remove all the “special” uncategorized handling stuff and just have it ship as a regular editable category, do the special suppression via css controlled by a site setting.
Every few days someone has an issue with uncategorized we got to fix the root cause instead of adding more hack.
I completely agree with this. There is little reason to have Uncategorized behave special. Sure you always need a category to be assigned to a Topic, but if someone removes all categories from their instance, surely an error will occur when they try to create a new topic and can’t assign a category.
By default, Discourse should continue to ship with an Uncategorized category, just make it a regular one though and not special. That way, anyone could technically delete it and just create another category that would be their default or whatever.
I’ve seen a fair share of uncategory logic when I’ve been in and out and I must say, it always felt like walking on pins and needles when you had to alter code that was dealing with Uncategorized.
I have mentioned this before:
I don’t think it is cached as hard refreshing and clearing the cache folder in rails didn’t help.
They aren’t referring to the browser cache, but the server cache.
I flushed Redis and cleared the tmp/cache folder in Rails too. 
What is the status of “Uncategorized”? This bug is still reproducable in the stable branch as of today. I see no use for it, and would like to get rid of it.
Pretty sure we fixed this issue.
