Thanks @downey (and @tobiaseigen). That was definitely useful to know; equally it confirms that it unfortunately doesn’t meet my requirements! To recap, what I’m after is a way for those I have invited to a private discussion group to see who else they are sharing their posts with. This is primarily to create trust and reduce inhibitions.
As per @tobiaseigen’s suggestion I am configuring access to the private categories using groups, so essentially what I am looking for is a widget that shows, on the category homepage, all the users belonging to the group associated with the category (or a selection of them, with an option to click to see all).
Why do you need such a widget? How many people are in your groups? You could just provide a link to the group page from the “about this category” page.
Have you seen the feature that lets you mention everyone in a group at once, just by using @GROUPNAME - expands automatically to include everyone. You could put this in the “about this category” page and keep it up to date, if it’s not too many people.
Thanks! That’s a pretty good solution, at least for now.
I guess adding everyone’s usernames to the “about this category” page would save a click, but we like the idea of having a more visual interface with everyone’s avatars and preferably real names. In fact, we might even want that clicking on them would then take you through to their profile page on our existing system, rather than their Discourse profile page. (We’ll be using SSO for the integration.)
I currently have a few categories that are locked to specific user groups. However, it’s impossible (afaik) to easily see which groups have access to that category… Even if I am a member of a group that DOES have access to it.
Yes, the category shows up and has a Lock icon next to it. But it would be great if I were able to easily see that members of GroupA and GroupB have access to Category1, and members of GroupB only have access to Category2. Perhaps a subheading under the group name… or a dropdown…
This way I can be certain WHO will have access to the post I am creating in a given category.
I’m looking at doing that, but given that access might change (add a group, here, remove a group there) as the community grows, it seems useful if there were a way for people to just know at a glance who is going to see what they’re posting.
I frequently get asked ‘who has access’, and have to be very explicit in the description. However, this can be tricky when access changes a bit, or the group name changes as the Category descriptions don’t seem to dynamically update.
It would be wonderful to have a nice friendly view for those users who can see a Category that has the groups with access clearly visible. It would also be extremely helpful to have the Category moderators also available on the same view - at the moment this is only via /about or via a group mentioned in the description.
Interesting, we have some internal discussion going about making the relationship between groups and categories more evident that @dax is championing. We will keep this in mind.
One tricky thing we need to allow for is that in some cases secrecy is desired, so I am not sure if exposing this info is a default on / default off thing or if it is a global vs category group setting.
How about just using the existing category and group permissions for that?
If the category is private, then only those in the groups with access can see it anyway.
If a group is private / hidden then it would also be hidden within the category for those users.
With my small brain, I can’t see any situation where that wouldn’t work.
I have been running a number of Discourse forums, some of which are over 10 years strong now. One recurring question we are sometimes asked when introducing Discourse’s Groups and Categories concepts is “How do I know which Groups can see a post in the ‘XYZ’ Category?”.
This is more often asked in communities where there are a lot of small private Categories (for example a ‘steering committee for a medical specialist interest group’) - they often want to be reassured that only members of that steering group can see the content therein, but as an ordinary user there is nowhere they can see this.
As an admin I can see this easily, in the Category admin tools, but for ordinary users they simply have to trust that I have set up the Category and Group settings correctly.
Users who are new to the forum, unfamiliar with forums, or nervous about accidentally posting sensitive internal discussions to a wider-than-intended forum audience are sometimes clearly inhibited from posting anything at all.
Would there be a way for some version of the ‘see/reply/create’ matrix which I can see in the Category admin pages to be surfaced for the ordinary user? Perhaps instead of the admin wrench an ordinary user might see ‘Category Info’ which could tell them key things about that category which would include which Groups can see it, but may also be extended to show other enabled features like ‘Make new topics wikis by default’, approval settings, etc.
I believe though the Op is looking for a way to display what group(s) have the see permission. As they mentioned as admin they can get the info. A group owner is not likely going to be a new member of a forum.
I imagine with some CSS it might be able to add to closed categories? To have it show group see access.
This is great but I’m looking for the inverse of this function, so that the Groups which can see/reply/create in a category is visible somewhere in the Category.
At present I am often finding myself adding information about “Who can see this Category” manually into the ‘About’ Category topic. This is a workaround but a very labour intensive one when you have a lot of forums, a lot of categories, and a lot of groups. And as they change over time, things get out of sync.
I think with certain types of forum where there are many private categories visible only to spcific groups, this is something the normal user (not just admin/mod/group owner) should be able to see. It’s essential for peace of mind when they are posting.
To illustrate this with a use-case, one of the Discourses I run is being used as a lightweight Customer Relationship Manager platform - we create a category for a customer which is private to them, it’s for bidirectional discussion, support, and comms. Each customer inevitably wants to be reassured that what they post in there is only visible to us, the support team, and not the rest of the forum. But they have only the padlock icon to reassure them. Which could easily mean category security settings of ‘trust_level_0’ as opposed to ‘everyone’ and the padlock will still appear.
I know my usage of Discourse is not necessarily representative of the wider community, but I’d appreciate views from both sides on whether this is something useful. Possibly ‘Category Visibility’ might be a plugin as opposed to core…?
