Custom Guest Mode

We’ve run into this challenge when adding a guest feature to Discourse for Teams. What we ended up doing is semi-automating this process:

  1. Create a new group for a guest/guests (could be multiple people working for a vendor, for example)

  2. Create a new category for content shared between internal users and that guest group

  3. Use the category permissions to allow the new guest group to only access that category

  4. We then added a reminder to the composer so internal users are aware that they’re posting in an area guests can see.

Steps 1-3 are possible manually with Discourse out of the box (we have a guide: How to use category security settings to create private categories), but the additional warning from step 4 would take some custom work.

It’s not likely that we’ll add permissions on a per topic basis any time soon, as it adds a lot of complexity.

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