Unexpected behavior with topic templates for Uncategorized

Bug
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I’m having an issue where I set the “Uncategorized” category template but when the user in the Discourse home creates a topic, which automatically uses the category “Uncategorized” the template is not loaded. I can only see the category template when creating a topic in the “Uncategorized” category page. Is that a bug? Thanks!

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I’m seeing the same thing. It seems like unexpected behavior to me, so I’ve moved this into its own bug topic.

I’m not 100% sure how this should work since Uncategorized is not a standard category, so let’s see what the rest of the team thinks!

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Ok thank you @tshenry. The “Uncategorized” category even though it’s not a standard category, it has the template section on the configuration, and it works as expected on one use case so IMHO I would expect to also work on other use cases where that category is used to create a topic.

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I’m seeing the same thing. Is there any update on this? Thanks!

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:wave: @ericaxu let me check with our team on this one.

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We don’t have plans to change this at the moment – is there some reason you must use the uncategorized category in this role? What’s forcing you to do that? Can you elaborate?

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Thank you so much!

The use case is that many people comes to our forum (https://forum.obsidian.md/) to ask for help and guidance. It used to be that the uncategorized was named “Obsidian” to talk about product related things, but since new people sometimes don’t know they need to choose a category, moderators have to move them all the time. Therefore we did some bulk moves and renamed uncategorized to “Help” instead.

If this is not happening, could you please let me know if the following is the most sensible workaround for now?

  1. Move all posts from Help (uncategorized) to another New Help category;
  2. Disable uncategorized feature;
  3. Move New Help to the top so that it would automatically be chosen.

Will the help template always be applied in that case?

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I believe this would work – I can do a quick test to be certain.

EDIT: Here’s how this would work @ericaxu –

  • Disabling uncategorized forces the user to select a category before typing a post
  • If your Help category is at the top of the category list, it’ll be most prominently visible.
  • When a user selects it, the topic template will populate.
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