As your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community grows, and more and more discussions are posted, it's likely you'll need to move some of them from one Category to another (typically because they're off-topic or just better suited elsewhere). In this article, we'll examine the three ways you can accomplish this.
Required permissions
The ability to move discussions requires a few permissions:
- the
Garden > Moderation > Manage permission, - the
Edit permission for the Category that the discussion is currently in, - and the
Add permission for the Category you want to move the discussion to.
To learn more about accessing and managing your Roles and their permissions, check out the article below.
Move a single discussion
1. From the main Discussions list page or an individual discussion's page, click the ellipsis (...) menu associated to the discussion you want to move, and select Move.
2. In the resulting dialog:
- Choose which Category to move the discussion to.
- If you want to optionally provide a redirect link, check the associated box. This is typically done when moving discussions that are popular, as they may be bookmarked by your users.
- Click Move to complete the process.
Move multiple discussions
Do you need to move multiple discussions to the same Category? Rather than performing the method above for each one, you can move multiple discussions at the same time.
Before we begin...
The ability to multi-select discussions and comments must be enabled for your Vanilla community before you can move multiple discussions.
To check this:
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Forum > Posting.
- Make sure the Enable checkboxes on discussions and comment option is toggled ON.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save.
Steps
1. On the main Discussions page, check the box for each discussion you want to move.
2. At the bottom left of the page, click Move.
3. In the resulting dialog:
- Choose which Category to move the discussions to (all discussions must go to the same Category).
- If you want to optionally provide a redirect link, check the associated box. This is typically done when moving discussions that are popular, as they may be bookmarked by your users.
- Click Move to complete the process.
Move discussions when deleting a Category
This option is mostly used when archiving a Category, or merging two Categories.
1. Access the Dashboard.
2. Navigate to Settings > Forum > Categories.
3. Click the Category's actions menu and select Delete.
4. Select the Move content... option, and select the Category to move all content to.
5. Upon clicking Delete Category, the Category is deleted and all of its discussions and associated comments will be moved to the chosen replacement Category.
📝 NOTE: Before deleting a Category, review the considerations below.
Considerations when deleting a Category
- Deleting a Category is permanent; not even Vanilla Support can bring it back.
- If the Categories in question have custom permissions, be sure to review them beforehand.
- If the allowed Discussion Types (Discussions, Questions, Ideas, Polls) don't align, content will be lost. For example, if the Category you're deleting contains Questions but the Category you're moving content to does not support this Discussion Type, those questions will be lost.
- Categories with custom permissions can also define view permissions for each Role. Depending on each Category's custom view permissions, users in certain Roles may either lose or gain access to content in the replacement Category.
✔️ TIP: Beyond View permissions determining whether users can even see the content, you should also review the more admin-related permissions to ensure your Admins and Moderators will be able to manage the new content.
Additional resources
Click the link below to access a video expanding on what you learned in this article.
