Is it possible to create a topic that is only updatable (reply, edit) only by the author, but readable by everyone?
I’m thinking of an “updates/change log” topic where the author keep adding new replies as updates to the topic. To prevent noise, everyone else who would like to discuss the posts can only create “Reply as new topic”.
While continuously reediting the original post is a way to do this, if the updates are long and numerous, a single post would be hard to read. Reediting the original post also prevents user from getting a nice notification and jumping to the latest post.
The single author filter is not ideal because it’s an additional click and new visitors may not know of the feature. And if discussion is allowed in the topic and the author participates, this filter no longer works since it will mix “updates” with replies to comments.
If so then the staff (admin/moderator) can create a topic, then close the topic. Only they (or other staff members, who presumably can control themselves) would be able to reply to a closed topic.
You could also archive the topic if you don’t want anyone liking the post, bookmarking, etc – if you want it totally frozen and unable to be changed in any way (except by staff of course).
I meant for regular user, at least a level below admin/mod or specific trust levels.
If I may expand idea. This is probably more suited to a plugin. A user with a high enough trust level may create a topic and specify who can create replies.
It can be
Author only
Trust level X or above
Invited users
A can be used for the scenario I described in the original post and various other where you want only a smaller group of people to contribute. While I think in most cases discussion involving everyone is the best, there are situations where limited write access is needed. For example, if a topic becomes unruly instead locking it, a mod can come in a modify the write/reply permission to only high trust level users.
Do you think this is useful or too easy to abuse?
It would have to be a rather high trust level, otherwise you can execute some pretty exquisite griefing with this: just create a bunch of topics only you can reply to.
It has been discussed before in terms of panel discussion topics where only (X) users can reply to the main topic, like 5 “experts” and a moderator. So it is not exactly a new idea, and I think it has merit, we just need override per-topic permissions @sam at some point. Not urgent, but is on our list.