The discussion revolves around the inability to ban users from specific categories in Discourse, as there is no native feature to restrict access via negative permissions (e.g., ‘cannot see’). Users propose workarounds using groups: adding all users to a category-specific group and removing banned users. However, this becomes impractical with large user bases. Some suggest a plugin or feature allowing dynamic groups with set operations (e.g., AccessGroup - BannedGroup) to simplify access control. dylanh724 highlights the need for a more efficient solution, while kevincox advocates for user-defined automatic groups to manage permissions more flexibly. Moin points to the dynamic groups plugin as a potential solution. tobias eigen and Falco confirm the current group-based workaround, though it’s not ideal.
Most of our forum is pretty general. However, one part is a “forum game”. If you get caught cheating, you get banned from playing. However, we can’t actually ban them from that specific category … or can we? It’s getting hard to moderate.
EDIT: A workaround, I made a group to store the people suspended from a certain category. However, it would be great if I could natively ban people from certain categories (with the see/create/reply permission options).
I think the only way to do this would be to create a group that includes everyone who is allowed to be in the category.
It would be nice to have a negative category permission available on category security settings, e.g. “Cannot create/reply/see”. But that does not exist now.