I don’t suppose there is a way to completely hide a category and its topics from all views. I want to have admin access but not have to see any discussions in one particular category on my forum that is reserved for leadership/management discussions I shouldn’t be privy to. I guess it would be nice to be able to turn this on/off in my preferences.
On the category page, click the “Edit” button and then go to the “Security” tab. From there, you can set permissions on a per-group basis.
Oh, I might have misunderstood you. If you don’t want it to show up for your admin account, you can click the circle at the upper-right corner on the category page and choose “Muted”.
If you are an admin, this is unavoidable – I suggest logging out of admin to a ‘regular’ account (or a moderator) if you want to have limited visibility.
Admins are superusers, they can see and do everything by definition.
Yeah, this is what we are doing but it then creates an odd situation where our /about page is not accurate and we do not have a good record of who is logging in and doing what as admin.
Don’t know if there’s a way for the admin’s IP to be logged in on two accounts at once.
For now, if I was in this situation, I would maybe add your ‘civilian’ account to that /about page. If something is wrong, they can PM your civilian account and you can hop onto the admin account.
Or you can have any PMs that are sent to the admin also emailed to you so you know when/if to hop accounts.
I was thinking of having two accounts: one ‘civilian’ and the admin. The civilian is set with the highest trust level. So if I personally see something wrong I can quickly flag it with that high trust level and then I can hop onto the admin account and fix/mitigate/correct it.
This is similar to how it goes on MUSHes, where a game owner has a ‘wizard’ account and then their character. That way things are separate. To me, the admin account is the ‘wizard’ and should only be logged into when needed. I know I’m the admin but I am a user and community member too. I don’t want a big “this is the admin” marker on every post I make.
Think of it like the bat cave, haha. Civilian account is Bruce Wayne. Someone sends the bat signal and you spring into action.
But it would be so much easier to be able to have two sessions going on at once, but probably not technically feasible. Unless you use two separate browsers.
EDIT: For another analogy: think of the admin account as ‘root’ and your civilian account with the top-tier trust level as a user with sudo privs. My personal opinion is that I don’t want to use root for everything I do, so I have a user account with sudo just in case.
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It is feasible with the Chrome “select which browser user you are” functionality. That became a lot more prominent in the latest ver of Chrome which shows the current browser user name in the toolbar…
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I saw that with the recent update. I was also thinking of having the admin account open on an incognito window. Don’t know if I can use incognito and ‘regular’ at once in two separate window instances of Chrome.
You just click on the name in the title bar to switch identities in the browser:
(they didn’t let me assign a real logo to it, so I had to pick from the terrible prefab ones… sorry about the ninja)
I do the google chrome identity switching all the time, also to have different identities going in google for different projects. in OSX there is also now an equally stupidly named but very handy “People” menu item that lets you more quickly choose between the identities. Two clicks rather than three clicks. 
Mine worked. Not sure how I got it though… Maybe connected to my Google Apps account?
Before someone closes this I just really wanted to say that you should never apologize for a ninja @codinghorror. Ninjas are awesome.
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