Folks in our community are also asking for something like this very old (and closed) feature request for author-only topics.
Specifically, this is in the context of our community “package announcements” category, where we have many authors who post announcements and updates regarding their topics. Folks have realized that these topics can make for lightweight “release newsletters” if they watch the topic (with email!) for replies. But — even if highly moderated — that can get noisy fast.
This would be a great behavior in this context!
The original ask was closed, citing:
This doesn’t work for us because there isn’t a clear group. Anyone can create packages, and we want anyone to create (and then update) their announcement topics.
I’ve not found any other workarounds here, but it seems like it’d be useful for other communities, too.
I think it should be possible to hide the reply button in a category with CSS. It wouldn’t stop people from replying, but it would clearly be bad behavior if someone did.
Those are both an interesting thoughts — I’m open to other ways of acheiving this goal, too. Another option might just be changing the default to reply-as-new-topic:
Maybe the Journal plugin would be something suitable? We are currently using it in our forum for grow diaries where non-authors can only leave indented comments while the “main feed” is for the topic author only.
This seems like a good, lightweight option. It’s in an early draft stage, but I’m working on a theme component that will let me add the “published” tag to a topic in order to strip away all the user interface widgets I don’t want people to see.[1] I got the idea from this post:
It shouldn’t be hard to disable the reply button based on a tag or category.
Actually, Restricted Replies (Discourse official) and Private Replies (mine) are different plugins. I think in this case, Restricted Replies would be a better fit.