Hi! First time poster here. We’re running into issues where our initial implementation of Discourse has not taken into account a use case we are running into now. I can’t seem to find any related use cases or info on how to approach this, so I was wondering if there’s a guru here that can help us.
The use case
We have all our categories open to everyone. However, we are now creating a new group that should not have access to all our categories, but they should only be allowed to open and access one category, and only reply to topics that other groups have created. Having all our categories open is working against us now, because I can’t find a simple solution to limit one group now to only one category.
Ideal situation
I understand that our implementation isn’t great. However, we cannot invest too much time into re-implementing the whole website - and assigning new rights to all the other groups will be a giant effort.
I’m hoping someone ran into this issue too and is able to share their creative solution If you need more info, please let me know.
This is tricky. You’re certainly not the only one who has run into this, and it does often happen a bit later in a community’s life, so it’s understandable that your earlier success is what has led you to this new problem.
There isn’t really any built-in way to create a group that has less permissions that “everyone”.
I think what you’ve to do is
Create a new group for most of your users, e.g. @members
Add all existing users to that group
(Optional) Add these new users to a different group, e.g. @guests
Update category permissions to define which ones have a given level of access for @members vs. @guests
It may take a little elbow grease, but you could find some ways to make this easier to do in bulk.
For example, the CSV created by export users contains a column for group names, and the bulk invite feature also uses a CSV with group names to add users to groups.
It’d take a bit of data munging to get it right, but it should be doable. I’d recommend starting with a small test CSV file first with only a subset of users (1 or 2 at time) to ensure things work as expected, before doing this for everyone.
Roughly many users, groups, and categories do you currently have?
I’d say we have around 3k users right now, 25 categories, and 25 groups. Your suggestions sound very doable. I guess I was very much hoping not to spend too much time diving into this, but I’ll discuss with the team if we want to take this approach.
Thank you for the quick reply by the way! Very much appreciated.
If you need more info, please let me know.