Offering "private support" as part of a public support community

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

I’m not sure if messing with the full, create_post and readonly is the right way to go, since full and create_post do imply “see all” in quite some places. It won’t be easy to create a maintainable plugin that way. Additionally, I think it would be not very intuitive.

Also, it would be cool if the topic author would be able to add extra people (for instance a colleague) to the topic, for instance by mentioning them, and in that case this mechanism won’t suffice.

Right now my idea is to leave the permissions intact and add a section below the security groups:

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Enable private topics in this category
Allow the following groups to see all topics [x support staff] [x sales support]

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@Simon_Manning

However, seeing only one’s own topics and guaranteeing that is true across the relevant category page, latest, search and anywhere else looks much more challenging. I haven’t figured that out.

I did a similar thing in the private replies plugin, but then for posts in a topic instead of topics in a category.
I think I’ll get pretty far with some patches in TopicGuardian.

@tobiaseigen

think the lowest hanging fruit here is door number 3, improving group inboxes so they work well for providing support to people who log in, not just to people who email for support.

Yes, that could be very low hanging fruit. Your summary of my request is accurate, and I found two more things that would bring messages more in par with topics.

• When I search the forum I have to explicitly add in:private to my search query to search my messages. Sometimes I really don’t remember if something was a (more or less public) topic or a PM to a group. Why not include them by default?

• Additionally, I think it would be nice if there was a simple link to the messages in the right tab of the hamburger menu. Yes, there is the envelope icon, but it has a list of messages, and not a link to the messages screen at /my/messages. That screen feels tucked away.

The items in the drop down are partly the same as the tabs in the next screen, except for Messages and Badges. So when I need to go to my messages, I always click Summary and then Messages.

Compare the items in the drop down

with the tabs in the profile screen

There’s Summary, Activity, Invites and Preferences in both, but Drafts in one and Notifications, Messages and Badges in the other. So “Messages” feels very hidden for me (that goes for Notifications and Badges as well but I don’t use them that often).