@sam agree sorry for the tag, but I’ve been randomly bringing this up for years and it’s a big deal for some. Impersonate is the one feature that makes user privacy a serious concern with Discourse, especially if using Discourse for an internal (work) communication and collaboration platform.
We have used it in the past, and are bringing back a discourse instance for use in our union. Not for the membership, but for the elected officers. For the time I administered the old instance, I was a regular representative like most. I’m now in leadership/administration of the group, so my role in the organization would not be at odds with a discourse admin’s abilities to see all materials within all categories. But it did then…
Our executive group had serious concerns with an admin having the ability to view their discussions within their (executive) privileged category. I hackily solved by hiding it from non executive group members with CSS (including hidden from admin), and pointing out how to view the logs to see if I ever disabled the specific theme component called “user privacy”.
The other MAJOR concern was an active representative who is an discourse admin (again rather than an a contracted IT guy) could just impersonate another user, read private messages, and tinker around in someone’s personal settings and goods.
All I can say is it would be great if there was possibly a way to focus on admins not having global viewing privlidges, but rather more of site administrative access, defaulting to only see contents they are assigned to. Plus a clear notification system to designated for all users to highlight if the admin staff is tinkering with this kind of stuff.
Call it something similar to discourse teams, maybe discourse professional. Something that’s not meant as much as an Internet forum but more of a business knowledgeable, collaboration and communication platform. Discourse would SHINE in this role, provided the admin eyes on everything capacity can be limited/curtailed or eliminated. (most centrally impersonate and reading messages vis profile/messages tab).