I noticed that custom user fields are always visible to users during signup or in their profiles, depending on the settings. Is there currently a way to create a user field that’s only visible and editable by staff (for internal use), not exposed to users? If not, would this be something the team …

Thanks a lot for the suggestion! Originally, I was planning to use custom user fields because I wanted to write a small component that displays specific information I add for each user. So I hadn’t really considered the Discourse User Notes core plugin. But it does sound like User Notes might be a…

There is a feature request for that: Option to include user field that is only editable by staff You may want to share your use case there to support the request. Depending on what you want to use the field for, it may be sufficient to hide the user field for everyone except staff with a theme com…

I run discourse for university courses, and the custom user field would be the student number. A theme component seems like an OK stopgap solution, but making a custom field completely invisible to anything but staff or system API would be cleaner.

Actually, I wonder if the option to hide the user field on sign up , which was added recently, makes user fields that users cannot see possible. I think user fields are only shown to users when they are editable. So if you hide it on sign up and disable editing (and showing and searching) the field …

[image] Bug: UserField "Editable after signup" automatically forces "Show on signup" Bug When creating a user field (UserField) in the admin panel, there is a sequence-dependent behavior: Initial state: “Show on signup” is checked by default “Editable afte…

Hey, I noticed a setting in the admin called “Staff user custom fields”. I’m not entirely sure what it’s for or how to use it. Could you help me understand how this works? Thanks!

So far I had no use case for using custom fields through the API. So I cannot tell you more than what I learned from [image] Adding non-visible user custom fields to the API Site Management bookmark This guide explains how to expose user custom field data throu…

Have a look at Discourse User Notes , a plugin now included in core. It’s meant for staff to internally share notes about users. (Loves cats – Golfs with the CEO – etc.)

@copymonopoly did the suggestions from Moin and Toddz help you resolve your issue? FWIW, we here on meta make very active use of user notes to share information amongst staff about our members. It works well (arguably better than custom user fields) because notes are right at your fingertips: [i…

[image] copymonopoly: I noticed a setting in the admin called “Staff user custom fields”. I’m not entirely sure what it’s for or how to use it. I wasn’t sure about this either but found a couple of clues… It makes more sense next to the companion setting Public user custom fields: [image] …

[image] ToddZ: so you’d have to enter the field names precisely. Is it the name? Based on the doc I shared above , I thought you need the ID [image] Adding non-visible user custom fields to the API Enter the custom field in the format user_field_X, where X is the ID number you noted earlie…

Can admins create user fields that are only visible/editable in the admin panel?

Support

copymonopoly October 28, 2025, 3:35pm 5

Really appreciate your help earlier! I’ve drafted a bug report showing this behavior clearly.

Topic		Replies	Views
Adding and editing user custom fields Bug user-custom-fields	9	6294	March 20, 2015
Option to include user field that is only editable by staff Feature user-custom-fields	13	1115	October 28, 2025
How to make user fields visible to all users Support	5	1023	October 6, 2020
Custom fields should be editable by staff Bug	0	66	March 11, 2025
Custom user fields not available in api Development rest-api , user-custom-fields	3	165	February 11, 2025

Can admins create user fields that are only visible/editable in the admin panel?

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