After 1.5 year using discourse, I am puzzled regarding the difference between a private category that would be accessible/visible to only one group, and group messaging within that same group. Is there any?
Typically, for a group that want to discuss their private project, the PM board of that group list all topic titles very much like a category does and I find little advantage to creating a private category. So am I overcomplicating things if a private category is created only for one group?
The main difference is how the messages are displayed. In a category, everyone with permissions has visibility of every topic in the feed. PMs would be mixed up amongst an individual’s other PMs (if they had some).
That the PMs would be mixed amongst other messages, isn’t this also presented per group, avoiding the confusion you describe, like in my screenshot (mobile version):
Yup, it absolutely is – it’s just a little less visible/intuitive if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
The main difference is that PMs allow per-topic “permissions”, and categories have permissions that apply globally to all topics.
PMs are the only place in Discourse where you get per-topic “permissions” regarding who gets to see the topic – by adding people to and removing people from the PM.
Another (admittedly subjective) difference is that the category interface is just nicer than the private message interface.
A big difference is that if you receive emails for notifications there is no way of tailoring them per topic: you receive emails of all PM notifications, or emails of all PM notifications “only when away”, or turn off emails for all PM notifications. This makes a PM group inbox like a category where you are “watching” every post and potentially receiving emails for every notification.
