Hi :slight_smile: I created category and on the Security tab changed permissions from everyone to our internal group. Later I created a subcategory inside. I did not change it’s security settings, i.e. it remains “accessible” by everyone; but of course they cant visit it because it’s parent category is not listed on the front page of the forum, as I thought. Also I created topics inside this subcategory. A assumed that they will be inaccessible to others. And at first sight it was so. But later my test account received digest email message with that private topics inside. I was shocked. Currently the forum is under construction so nothing bad actually happens… I investigated this and find out the following: Subcategory does not inherit security settings of it’s parent. At least a checkbox Inherit should exist, checked by default. So topics from such an “not closed, not open” subcategories are accessible: in the latest topics list by direct link in email digest Example screenshot of latest topics: [latest-topics-security]

Yep, this is by design, and many topics over the matter https://meta.discourse.org/search?q=category%20inherit&expanded=true There is some discussion around adding some additional validation ensuring the child category meets the same security permissions as the parent though at Shouldn't a category be the mother of all subcategories? - #3 by sam

I believe it is counterintuitive. If you are disabling access to a book, you are disabling all pages, not just the cover. May be it should be something like this? On subcategory creation: copy security settings of the parent. On changing parent permissions: ask admin if he wants to recursivly iterate over all children and update them.

Subcategory does not inherit security settings

Product Support

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) November 2, 2018, 11:00am 2

That’s right. Security settings are not inherited by subcategories. You’ll need to adjust those permissions to match the parent if that’s what you want.

Topic		Replies	Views
Subcategories do not inherit permissions from parent category Feature	25	6174	November 29, 2021
Inheritance of access rights for subcategories broken Feature	4	1308	August 3, 2016
Maincategory with "Subcategory permissions cannot be less restrictive than parent's" error Product Support	11	911	March 8, 2019
Subcategory permissions cannot be less restrictive than parent's Product Support	11	1464	June 2, 2019
Related category permissions Theme component	2	324	November 20, 2024

Subcategory does not inherit security settings

Related topics