The concepts of groups and categories are baked into discourse and touch many things, so I am not sure there is going to be appetite for changing this. It would be a massive change.
That said, I agree this has always been an area that makes discourse seem complicated to set up and manage, even when compared with legacy systems like yahoo groups or mailing lists.
We do have some special groups already that get special handling, eg trust levels
, everyone
, and moderator
/admin
. Maybe we could also allow creation of special groups used just for category access behind the scenes, directly from the category security settings? Something like:
For category foo
:
- provide UI for selecting users and giving them access to see, reply and create
- when users are selected, create
foo_see
,foo_reply
,foo_create
groups and add users to them - provide UI for removing users and changing their access to see, reply and create
- if category moderation is enabled, also allow users to be specified as category moderator and create a
foo_moderator
group for it. foo
access groups are not visible from the/groups
page or suggested with@
in the composerfoo
access groups are tied to specificfoo
category and cannot be used for accessing other categories- subcategories of
foo
can automatically be given access tofoo
instead of the current circular error handling, which is confusing
What I like about this is we could also expose UI when looking at a category to see the names of everybody with access to the category, and which people have see, reply and create access. I’ve always felt that this has been a gap. Right now the only programmatic info we provide is the indicating a category is secure - we don’t know who has access.
By putting this functionality within the category settings, we are also simplifying how categories and groups are created… this opens the door to letting more users create and manage secure categories. There could even be a foo_owner
group for people who are allowed to manage access for the category along with site admins.
I am not sure how this might look and there may also not be appetite for a change like this, but we always welcome brainstorming and new ideas, preferably with mockups!