I’m not sure if this is actually a bug but I’m stumped. I was going to post this in #bug but changed my mind since I’m not certain if it would come up again and may be a feature/expected behavior that does not need fixing. We had an inline post in a topic that really should have been a private message and was flagged as off-topic. Before dealing with the flag, I selected the post with the timeline wrench and moved it to a new private message, made sure both participants were invited, then marked the flag valid and “leave the post unchanged”. I also entered a regular post explaining a message was moved private and Staff-colored it. After I returned to the topic, the OP of the thread had replied regarding the moved message that was now a PM, but the public reply was all in italics. I started the process to copy that text out since it had information that should also be moved to the PM, but while looking at it, I realized it had the eye symbol with a slash and was a whisper. Odd, didn’t know non-Staff could do that… I figured perhaps users could whisper but it wouldn’t be visible to them if they wanted to make an in-thread private comment to the moderators. On research in the Admin console, it shows whisper ability can be granted to specific groups, but the only enabled group is Admin, and this member is not in that group. My only guess is that this was a rare scenario caused by timing: My hypothesis the regular user was composing a long reply at the same time I was in process of moving the post to a PM, so when he replied in the public topic, Discourse converted it to a Staff whisper since the replied-to-message can no longer be seen. The only thing is, he didn’t directly reply to the moved post; he replied to my Staff-colored response logging to the public why the post disappeared. That’s why I originally thought maybe general users can whisper to Staff only, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I don’t know if this needs fixing or is an actual reproducible bug, but was just curious if there’s some behavior that would allow a user not in a whisper-enabled group to whisper in-thread. In the below screen snap, user DeusIrae is a TL_3 Regular and not in any groups enabled for whisper. He’s replying (“your comp game”) to the original respondent whose post was moved to PM but the reply is to me. Maybe this is a failsafe for a public reply to a message that no longer exists? [Screenshot 2025-09-17 at 4.43.43 PM] [Screenshot 2025-09-17 at 5.11.35 PM]

I think I’ve had something similar happen before: [image] Phantom notification in DiscourseHub app Bug Yeah, I think you found another fun quirk when you replied just as I was merging another topic in. I think the post numbers changing mid-flow meant you ended up replying to a whisper post and inheriting the whisper state. Let me see if I can fix that up. +1 The replies to whisper posts are automatically created as whispers, so if post numbers change whilst a reply is being created then you can occasionally (though very rarely) get something accidentally created as a whisper by a ‘non-whisper’ user. To tidy up and convert the whisper to a regular post you can install the Toggle Whisper 👁 theme component (or use the API directly, depending on what you’re comfortable with)

Somehow, a non-Staff user was able to whisper in a general topic?

Product Support

tobiaseigen (Tobias Eigen) September 26, 2025, 5:34pm 2

This does look pretty odd! It’s hard to help you given this appears to have been a one off experience. If it happens again, see if you can get replication steps.

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Somehow, a non-Staff user was able to whisper in a general topic?

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