# Ban members from certain categories?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/ban-members-from-certain-categories/62916>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [May 18, 2017, 3:57am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/ban-members-from-certain-categories/62916 "2017-05-18T03:57:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![kevincox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/d6d6ee/32.png) [@kevincox](https://meta.discourse.org/u/kevincox)\
**Post date:** [January 16, 2026, 2:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/ban-members-from-certain-categories/62916/7 "2026-01-16T14:44:22Z")

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I would also love to see this. We also have a similar situation.

1. We have a few categories that are restricted to certain groups.
2. But we also need to be able to exclude certain people from these.

Having negative category membership would work. But I think a more powerful and flexible solution would be to have user-defined automatic groups (like staff is today). These groups could support basic set operations to determine membership.

For example with this feature staff doesn’t need to be a special case but can just be `admin + moderators`. The fact that this auto-group was created is really a strong hint that this feature is useful and should be extended to a general feature rather than a built-in.

With this you could implement the negative exclusion by having a group `HasAccess = AccessGroup - BannedGroup`.

These automatic groups would also be very useful for other use cases as well. For example:

## Incrementing Ranks

Right now we have a few locked forums that basically encompass smaller circles of people. Something like:

- Admin = Admin
- Moderators = Admin + Moderators
- BetaTeam = Admin + Moderators + Beta
- Trusted = Admin + Moderators + Beta + Trusted

Needing to apply the right list of groups to every category is tedious and error prone. We had many cases where one group was missing from a category that they should have had access to. Being able to define groups like this would make this much easier to manage:

- ModeratorsOrHigher = Admin + Moderators (this is built-in as `staff` auto-group)
- BetaOrHigher = ModeratorsOrHigher + Beta
- TrustedOrHigher = BetaOrHigher + Trusted

## Common Groups

It is also common for us to have multiple categories that have the exact same set of access rules. This is basically a simpler case than above, but it would be nice to be able to just create one auto-group and use it multiple times rather than needing to repeat the whole group list and keep it in sync across many categories.

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/ban-members-from-certain-categories/62916)._