My forum was attacked and spammed with posts that we don’t want visible. How can the forum be disabled except for staff to clean it up?

I’d simply change all of the category permissions to staff only. With a nice explainer somewhere (of course). You might like to do a data explorer query to record your existing permissions first, and if your forum is large/complex maybe do it all from the Rails console as a bulk action. That would…

You can’t “turn off” the forum and it magically still be useable by anyone. You could consider bulk unlisting of all topics until you get chance to delete the spam, then relist everything that remains?: [image] Administrative Bulk Operations Self-Hosting Bel…

You can set the forum to be read only except for staff. Read Only Modes in Discourse

[image] Isambard: we don’t want visible @pfaffman that doesn’t solve the “visible” part though :eyes:

I was considering a similar issue recently - Would the steps be Enable staff writes only mode Read Only Modes in Discourse Enable login required in admin settings Logout all users through the rails console Disable enable local logins (and any SSO). Use /u/admin to login as admin

[image] Robert: @pfaffman that doesn’t solve the “visible” part though :eyes: OH. I missed that. In that case, what you’d need to do is change DNS so that it no longer points to the forum and have the admins configure their /etc/hosts (Or equivalent) to point to the correct IP address. But t…

Thanks. There were few enough categories for this to be doable by hand (if somewhat annoying).

[image] JammyDodger: Would the steps be Enable staff writes only mode Read Only Modes in Discourse Enable login required in admin settings Logout all users through the rails console I don’t think this would work, as they could simply log back in: [image] Read Only Modes in Discourse Re…

I did have second thoughts about that bit afterwards. Do you think disabling local logins would be a suitable alternative/additional step? (And/or any SSO)

You’d need to turn off any OAuth methods too of course, but yes that could work nicely. Just be careful you don’t log off yourself (e.g. restore the site) inadvertently. Although in that case you can simply turn logins back on from the console. Are you planning this for meta …

Ha, no, nothing like that. Mainly just curiosity. :slight_smile: It seems like a useful plan to have in case of any emergencies. Though if there are too many steps then something else might be easier. I’ll edit in the extra step above. :+1: Thinking about it, logging everyone out and then disabli…

How to turn off forum except for staff

Product Support

JammyDodger May 8, 2024, 4:24pm 13

I’ve actually just tested this for something else, and enabling ‘read-only’ from the backup page prevented my test user from logging in to the site:

Topic		Replies	Views
Help with locking down forum Product Support	7	258	September 18, 2025
Shut-down the forum / Turn-off posting Product Support	7	2159	April 12, 2020
Login disabled in read only mode Product Support	1	297	January 16, 2025
Read Only Modes in Discourse Site Management how-to , explanation , read-only	11	2700	May 1, 2026
Hide an entire forum from public browsers? Product Support	2	295	April 26, 2024

How to turn off forum except for staff

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