I’m pretty new to discourse, i’ve spent half of my life using phpBB and really common thing/extension for it was to make it able to force all new topics in given category to be confirmed by moderator before the publication. It’s usefull for categories which has a strict rules about their title / body (like event directory for instance) or are vulnerable to topics containing some content which shouldn’t be there and can cause a legal troubles.
In my scenario, i need it for events directory to make sure each topic created has a proper title set (i have a strict topic rules to make it able to fetch the event topics by a third party tool) but the second scenario might also happen. On the other hand, i don’t want to prevent new users from posting topics in there as, in theory, anyone should be able to add an event there.
A perfect solution would be the one available in other forum software which i mentioned before - force confirmation of all new topics for a category. Is such thing possible / on a roadmap? If not, is that possible to achieve it with a plugin?
I have also considered integrating this into the group can... operations UI, but that may be a bit confusing. Because a certain group needs permission to create/reply first, before this setting kicks in.
There won’t be other UI changes. Open to suggestions, cheers!
I am a bit torn about in which tab they should be.
After looking through the existing options in all tabs, I am leaning towards the security one. Also, I plan to implement it similar to the permission options in the security tab.
If this is a requirement, you could use messages to a group responsible for handling confirmation. If the post is okay, the message could then be converted into a public topic.
As I was playing with the feature today (locally, on my fork), I realized a user can “bypass” the new topic approval setting by initially posting in an unrestricted category and then recategorizing it.
Any suggestions on how to approach this, if it’s something we should address?
Perhaps we break this into v1 and v2? v1 will handle new topic/reply creation in a category. Normal users cannot move a reply, so only topics have the ability to “bypass” this. Once v1 is merged, you can work on v2 to handle the recategorization edge case.
As for how to handle v2, I think the simplest option would be to prevent users from recategorizing the topic to a category that requires approval. Same way users can’t recategorize a topic to a category they don’t have “create” permissions in. A more complicated option would be to display the category as an option, but display a message indicating the new topics require approval, and to flag for moderation if they need the topic moved.
A simple workaround is not allowing the OP to recategorize to these unless staff, a harder limit would be not to allow any recategorization to this category unless staff
will take another look this week, sorry about that!
Any suggestions on how to approach this, if it’s something we should address?