I’m setting up my new discourse and I’m trying to hide some categories from view and leave only for admin. When I try to change the security from “everyone” to “admin” I get this error: “Any group that is allowed to access a subcategory must also be allowed to access the parent category. The following groups have access to one of the subcategories, but no access to parent category: everyone.” I don’t see that what I’m changing is part of a subcategory or parent category. Can I see what it’s referring to?
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around the issue of changing category security in a Discourse setup. medicalschoolhq is trying to restrict access to certain categories to admins only, but encounters an error message regarding subcategory permissions. simon explains that the error is due to subcategories allowing access to the group “everyone,” and provides steps to resolve the issue, such as changing subcategory permissions or removing the parent category. medicalschoolhq appreciates the help and suggests a potential feature improvement: a prompt asking if all subcategories should inherit the same permissions when the parent category is changed. simon agrees that this would be a helpful feature, especially for categories with many subcategories.
On the category edit modal of the category you are trying to change the permissions for, have a look at its “General” tab. You should see a list of the category’s subcategories. Something like this:
What the error message you are seeing means is that one or more of the subcategories allows the group “everyone” to access it. The group “everyone” includes all users on your site. You will either need to change the subcategory’s permissions so that it can only be accessed by admins, or remove the parent category from the subcategory so that it is no longer a subcategory of the category you are trying to edit. You can remove the parent category here:
Awesome! Thank you! What a very big undertaking! Every thought of a simple “Hey, you’re changing the parent, do you want all subcategories to be the same?”
That would be helpful for categories that have lots of subcategories, like the one in my screenshot (it’s from my dev site, not a real site.)