This video explains how you can use group permissions to create private categories (or private “forums”).
For a general overview of these features, see: Understanding groups and category permissions (security settings)
Transcript
In this video we’ll go over how to create a group of users and then give that group that I’ve created permissions to a private category.
In this Discourse install I have a category called staff and I want to give a specific group of users access to this certain category.
First I’ll jump into the admin page and then I’ll head over to users and groups and here I’ll create a new group.
We have a group of interns that will be joining the team shortly so we want to give them just a certain level of access to this staff category.
We want them to be able to see topics and reply to them but not to be able to create new topics so let’s create this group we’ll leave all these as defaults and go ahead and click create.
Once we’ve clicked create we can head back to our categories and find the private category that we care about: staff.
Now will edit this category. Head over to security and this is where we have our permissions page.
Currently users that are part of the group called staff can create, reply to, and see topics in the staff category.
Now I’ll go ahead and choose the interns group that I just created and then open this drop down and allow interns to reply to topics and see them, not create new topics. We could also choose “see” but for now I’ll just choose reply and see.
Then we’ll click the plus button and save the category and we’ll wait for this page to update.
Any new users that I add to this interns group will now be able to see all the topics in this staff category and they can reply to any of them - they just won’t be able to create a new topic in this category.
So that’s how to create a group in discourse and then give that specific group of users certain permissions to a private category