I’ve read this topic which basically state that it’s not a feature seen as needed so I’m not going to ask for it again. However, there are use cases for large communities like mine in which we have literally smaller forum existing inside the main one. Think about Clans in gaming culture. These sub…

You could allow only members of the clan category to post and remove the users you don’t want to be in the category. This would require that everyone that you want in the category to be a member of that group.

Great Topic for discussion. Simplest way to solve this is Trust Level. Knock people down when they need “banning”, and make the Category require High Trust. Have had exactly this situation recently and simply locked the user at TL 1, the Category required TL 2. Job done!

[image] Robert: Have had exactly this situation recently and simply locked the user at TL 1, the Category required TL 2. Job done! I’ve done same-same. And because I don’t let anyone get automatically higher than TL2 that was mentally and for administration really easy and un-complex solution…

I did this for a client a while back. Trust levels weren’t going to work for us, so instead we created private groups per-category which each user was automatically provisioned into, and category moderators were owners of. “Bans” were as simple as removing said memberships which meant zero work on …

[image] Stephen: groups per-category which each user was automatically provisioned into But how do you do that if the group is dynamic? Example: one of my clients has a forum with a “For Sale” category, accessible for TL2 and up. They want to ban certain members from creating topics there, …

Presumably the same way, provision users into groups based on a criteria (detect promotion to TL2?) then remove them if necessary? Just because TL2 is the entry criteria doesn’t mean that you need to rely on that TL2 status to determine membership, does it? It also depends whether you have the time …

But if we’re engineering something on the instance anyway, then I’d rather have category ban functionality :sunglasses: It makes things also more maintainable. If I have 50,000 users and I need all of them to be able to access the category but a few, then it’s hard to get a list of those few.

I mean, ban is just another word for exclusion, and Discourse doesn’t really have an exclude permission at all. Does it need to exist when ‘not inclusion’ is effectively the same thing? I like the explicit permit model, it makes troubleshooting stuff painless. I still have the odd nightmare about t…

I appreciate all the input for alternative solutions but I asked a specific technical question, not alternative that are compromises to what I’m trying to figure out :slight_smile:

[image] Stephen: Does it need to exist when ‘not inclusion’ is effectively the same thing? I would say yes [image] Richard - Communiteq: It makes things also more maintainable. If I have 50,000 users and I need all of them to be able to access the category but a few, then it’s hard to ge…

Category Ban is not supported but would it be possible with a plugin?

Development

RGJ (Richard - Communiteq) March 14, 2023, 1:51pm 11

I would say yes

@crius it would be doable with a plugin, I think you can get pretty far on the client side by overriding the permissions in the category serializer, and on the server side adding an extra check using NewPostManager.add_handler.

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Category Ban is not supported but would it be possible with a plugin?

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