Require category selection before writing topic

When allow uncategorized topics is disabled, I’d like to propose requiring the user to select a category before they are allowed to start writing the body of the post.

The use case for this is a site that makes significant use of topic templates. As users are not required to select a category, many go right to writing their post, and only select a category after they’ve written their post. As there is content in the composer, the topic template is not added, thus negating the usefulness of the template.

Seems reasonable to me, what do you think @neil?

Sounds useful to me. So disabling the body input field until the category is chosen like so?

Screen Shot 2017-07-18 at 4.22.27 PM.png701x390 24.3 KB

What about if they paste a link, which should auto-populate the body?

That works! I really don’t care too much about the UI of the disabled area, as long as it is disabled and clear how to enable it.

Ooh…interesting edge case. For my site, I’d prefer the template over the Onebox, but that’s site specific. Maybe do both - onebox/link first, template second.

No, I don’t mean onebox vs template. I think that has already been solved.

I guess it should ignore this new logic. If a link is pasted in the title, enable the body input field and do what we currently do today.