@maiki Wooooah. I didn’t know about that. Thanks for sharing!!!
However, with the current strategy, it’s kind of set and forget. When a course is authored we can create the topic and subcategory for the DEFAULT cohort and then populate the topics we want. If a new cohort is added we create a new group and subcategory, and copy the topics.
Then we can forget about it and just handle activity notices via the callback.
With the approach you described, would it be more manual work? “Send a group PM” sounds like an activity that’s happening during the lifetime of a course. If a new student enrolls in an existing course and is put in a certain cohort, we can add them to the correct group in Discourse and they then have access to the existing subcategory (for that cohort) and the copy it has of all topics. In this case, would they automatically be added to an existing “group PM” so no diff in workflow?
Would the UI appear the same? Currently we just have the topic and then all the posts (for a particular cohort, if necessary) under them, per the ‘usual’ Discourse UI.
I must say I hate having to do the subcategories and copies of all topics whenever a new cohort is created on our side, and having to manage that, so this direct PM sounds intriguing. But I have this apprehension using a “private message” to do everything a category + topics can do is somewhere missing something.