Creating/Deleting Categories Problem

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  wkduffy · Member · Jan 16, 2015 at 9:49 am

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  HI! Sorta stumped here while maintaining my videogame blog. I’ve got a multiple-staged problem with creating and deleting categories: For example, while creating a category named

  Alien Rage (PC, 2013, Poland): Rage On

  WordPress ends up creating a number of categories for some reason. For example, in addition to the full category name I want, several separate categories will also suddenly appear named

  Poland
  Alien Rage (PC
  2013

  So, I delete the incorrect ones, make sure my post is assigned to the fully-named category I want. But then when I revisit my dashboard, the wrong/truncated categories are back in place, and my post is not associated with the right (fully-named) one. What am I doing wrong and why is this happening? Thanks for any help and apologies for the length of this post…

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  deanroyal1 · Member · Jan 18, 2015 at 2:42 am

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  Hi! By inserting commas WordPress thinks you’re trying to create multiple categories. Commas are generally ways to separate multiple tags and/or categories when entering them into a single field.

  I suggest naming your categories with as little punctuation as possible to prevent unforeseen results today and in the future.

  Dean

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  wkduffy · Member · Jan 18, 2015 at 3:16 pm

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  Dean: Thanks for the info on this. A question: If I go through my 70 or so existing categories and removed the punctuation (just to make it all consistent and also remove possibilities for problems), would this change the url addresses linked by other sites? There’s a commercial site that links to my reviews (I put each one of my game reviews under a separate category); would doing this break all their existing links to my WordPress posts? Thanks.

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  deanroyal1 · Member · Jan 18, 2015 at 6:33 pm

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  The short answer to your question is “yes.” I feel this is one of those items you should research carefully before making changes. I’ll see if I can find more detailed information on the topic and follow up here.

  Dean

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  deanroyal1 · Member · Jan 19, 2015 at 3:13 pm

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  After some research and discussing with a friend, I don’t believe changing your category names will break any links. Check your stats. If the site that links to you is linking to your posts, you should see no category in the linking/referral URL anyway.

  What might change is your category page references: site.com/category/…

  Test your intentions on one category and see what the results are. If nothing breaks, you should be ok! Best of luck :-)

  Dean