When I click Make Public Topic on a Private Message, the message is converted to a topic - but I can’t work out which category it will end up in. How do I set the category for the ex-message? Thanks, Nick

Nope, but I suppose it’s a legitimate feature request. You should wait for a member of the Discourse team to answer this question.

Editing the category doesn’t fire the notifications for the new category.

Another problem with this is when you want to move a message into a private category. There currently is no way to do that without briefly exposing the topic to the public :frowning:

It may happen that a topic is made public to everyone instead of being assigned to a restricted category and administrators do not immediately notice it. It has also recently happened to me to have moved a PM containing a link to an alpha and private project in a public forum area rather than in a restricted category. Fortunately, a user immediately alerted me of the error I had done. PS @fefrei is a ninja…

Thanks all, can someone point me towards the code involved so I can have a go at making a plug in? I haven’t made a discourse plugin but am reasonably handy with a text editor.

[image] modius: Seems sensible to have a choice of category to target as part of the “Make Public” feature, if only to facilitate the ability to retain the privacy of certain topics. As a follow up.. as we have a policy of always categorising a topic i thought we could secure the uncategorised category. Looks like that is not an option. Perhaps the easiest change would be the addition of a forum setting that lets you nominate a specific category for Make Public that defaults to uncategorised. That way folks could set up a secure transition category where they have a chance to categorise the topic appropriately without fear of inadvertently making sensitive content public.

I just ran into this problem today. There is an additional, worse problem with this that is not yet mentioned in this topic. If members are watching the category it defaults to, it fires a notification about the topic immediately to them before you are able to change the category. Luckily the message I made into a topic was not confidential. I like the suggestion to provide an admin setting to choose a different default category - that would be fine. Or have the feature respect the ninja edit window (in our case 10 minutes - long, I know) as though the topic were new, before firing off any notifications. To replicate: set up a test user watching the category this feature defaults to (in our case it’s #community-building for some reason, likely because we disabled uncategorized topics?) write a message make the message public check outbound mail server (in our case mandrill) and see notification

Ouch, it sends an email straight away? I can see sending a Notification that when clicked would give the “oops”, but sending an email sounds risky. My guess is the code is using the create time when accounting for the “ninja delay” instead of the move time?

I’m also having this issue where I want to turn a private message into a topic in a private category, without wanting to trigger notifications / listing in Latest / sending emails. I found that this workflow works for me: Unlist private message first Make Public Topic Re-categorize the topic Re-list the topic Delete admin messages This will not trigger notifications or emails. It would be nice if you could pick a category when choosing Make Public Topic though – when I used this option, it went into a seemingly random category that I did not expect it to go to on our instance (since we have uncategorized disabled).

This not huge deal for us but we have a decent number of volunteer mods who sometimes forget to change the category, and the category it goes to we have set to not show in latest lists, so can be easily missed.

Which category does "Make Public Topic" target?

Product Support

eviltrout (Robin Ward) July 18, 2019, 5:45pm 21

I had some time this afternoon so I made a PR for this:

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Private Message to Private Category Feature	3	969	September 18, 2018
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"Make Private Message" on category description topic Bug	2	1044	October 2, 2017
Can't convert Personal Message to a Public Topic Product Support personal-messages	8	562	February 9, 2024
Move posts to private conversation Feature	21	3713	January 13, 2022

Which category does "Make Public Topic" target?

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