Unexpected behavior with topic templates for Uncategorized

[leog (Leo Giovanetti)]

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!

[tshenry (Taylor)]

저도 같은 현상을 확인했습니다. 제 생각에는 의도하지 않은 동작으로 보이므로, 이 문제를 Contribute > Bug 토픽으로 분리했습니다.

Uncategorized가 표준 카테고리가 아니기 때문에 이 기능이 어떻게 동작해야 하는지 100% 확신할 수 없으니, 팀원들의 의견을 들어보겠습니다!

[leog (Leo Giovanetti)]

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.

[ericaxu]

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

[justin (Justin DiRose)]

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

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

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?

[ericaxu]

@justin

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

Thank you so much!

@codinghorror

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?

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?

[justin (Justin DiRose)]

@ericaxu

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?

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.