# Category permissions and the new permission groups

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/category-permissions-and-the-new-permission-groups/409511
**Category:** Bug
**Created:** [7 augustus 2026 om 09:32 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/category-permissions-and-the-new-permission-groups/409511 "2026-08-07T09:32:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 8

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### Author: ![martin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/martin/32/491371_2.png) [@martin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin)
#### Post date: [11 augustus 2026 om 05:28 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/category-permissions-and-the-new-permission-groups/409511/8 "2026-08-11T05:28:04Z")

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Thanks for your thoughts, this is why I didn’t want to go into category permissions too much at first with that everyone change 😃

I think a lot of what you say here could simply be made impossible, I’ve already been working on some preliminary systems here with ACLs and a nicer permission UI on our kanban plugin that we are developing, here is an example, we intend to change the category permissions to use this eventually:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/a/3/e/a3eddab673bae29a4f1a68bbe533f70caad7cd56.png)

There are several rules involved here, like it’s impossible to give anonymous users Manager permissions for a kanban board and so on, and even supports mandatory permissions, like Admins can always manage a board.

> [@RGJ](#):
>
> What happens if I add `anonymous_users` while my forum is `login_required` ?

We would make it so you can’t add anonymous users when the forum is login required.

> [@RGJ](#):
>
> What happens if I only add `anonymous_users` to a category and don’t add `logged_in_users` ?

Again, another validation/restriction we can add.

> [@RGJ](#):
>
> So making this change would be adding a huge amount of complexity and weird combinations would be possible (you could do `anonymous users` and `staff` 😬 )

We could add validations/warnings for this kind of thing too.

> [@RGJ](#):
>
> Also, the current technical implementation is that when category permissions are set to `everyone`, there is simply no entry in `category_groups` and `read_restricted` is set to `false`.

This is what I want to avoid, these kind of implicit permissions that are everywhere in Discourse, rather than having logged in users + anonymous users explicitly always setup for a category if it’s public/not read restricted.

* * *

Anyway, for now I don’t want to get too deep into this, there’s a bit of a way to go before I deal with categories. But I do agree the OP is a bug that needs to be fixed in the interim, so I will still do this.

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