We have a discourse 2.7.0.beta3 instance for closed user groups. It hosts different communities, each of them has its own social focus (e.g. one is a maker space, the other one a pressure group for local bike traffic). Each community has its own group permissions inside discourse (https://forum.xxx/g).
Currently digest mails are sent to users including the moderators. The moderator has access to the other groups and receives a digest mail with all new articles, even if they are not available for members of “his group”. Is it possible to
a) limit the moderator permissions to ONE group
b) limit the links in the digest to those that are relevant for the user based on his own group permissions
I am pretty shure that this is possible, but could not find the correct setting yet …
The categories which are relevant for a particular community are linked to the communities group. People only see the categories for “their” community (plus some categories meant for all communities together).
I already tested the digest mail content, it only contains the threads linked to the groups where the user is a member of - this functionality is clear. The only open question is how to limit a moderators permission to just one particular group instead of moderation for all groups and users on the same discourse instance.
Well, again, groups isn’t the correct unit of work here – categories are. If a user is a “category moderator” for a specific category, that limits their moderator abilities to the specific category.
Categories contain topics.
Groups contain users.
Permissions in Discourse are always at the category level.
Is there any particular reason why you are seeking to colocate all of these disparate communities in one discourse site? If you can, I’d recommend creating a site for each community. If you are self-hosting and the sites are not large, you can set up one server to host multiple sites.
But I think you have a point… moderators should only be able to see the categories they are explicitly allowed to see, as configured in the category security settings. Admins see everything, but moderators do not. Is it possible your moderators are actually admins?
The instance has three communities now which may have social “inter-community-connections” in the future, as the community is growing and people get more familiar with discourse. The reason to share them on the same instance had mixed social and technical reasons.
Moderation: I see no way to restrict the moderator to his own group, even not with “custom group” and setting a “primary group”. Is there a global config which I missed?
I’ve sort of the lost the plot here, sorry. I am assuming your moderators do not have admin permissions. Beyond that, you want to check that the category security settings are correct and that only the people you want have access to each category.
Looking back at the OP, this seems to be about digests. Is that what we are still talking about? If so, you can have your moderators mute the categories they don’t want to see even if they have access to those categories. That should stop the categories from being featured in their email summaries or being visible when they visit the site.
@tobiaseigen The digests are not my point any more, that works as expected. @codinghorror gave the correct hints, I misunderstood the permissions concept (permission for categories, not for user groups). If I limit moderators to the correct categories, it should be fine.
We’re exploring using Discourse as an alternative to Facebook groups. In our use case, the groups are geography-specific (like one group for Oakland and another group for Los Angeles). These would be private groups based on where a user lives and we’d like to have different moderators for each group. In order for the permissions (which I understand to be “category-based”) to align with the groups, would we need to create a unique category for each group? So we’d have a “Los Angeles” category that would only be used within the “Los Angeles” group?
