Thanks for building and sharing this. I wonder how to scope anonymous users? Tried anonymous, anon, and everyone, but no one reaches them.
I want to display some categories for everyone (anonymous) users but not specific automated groups. The Category Lockdown plugin is the closest to it that I had found.
Anonymous users as in logged out users? If they don’t have accounts, how can you add them? TL0 targets all users, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Well, that is the point. I want to hide specific categories to only one group.
That would not make sense from a functional point of view, a user that belongs to that group could simply log out and see the category anyway.
From a technical point of view it is impossible, if a category is accessible to everyone, Discourse sets the read_restricted flag to false and all access mechanisms are bypassed.
From this plugins perspective, the closest you can get is NOT excluded_group (which is the same as trust_level_0 AND NOT excluded_group). But an anonymous user cannot be in a group, so no.
Of course I thought about it and understood that very likely for that reason the functionality is not active today. And I also clearly understand that the limitation would not be hard but soft.
The intention is to limit users who maintain a very low conversation ratio, with their reading ratio being 5 or 10 times broader. A badges and user title that marks them and an exit path explained in a simple way can “wake them up”.
I also know that it is common on the Internet for 90/97% to unintentionally fall into the group of lurkers, although I also know that this mechanism can motivate them, because they would be enabled to reply and contribute in other forums through a simple exit —providing three accepted answers as solutions— and not in the categories with the most traffic.
Technically, something similar is what supports peer-to-peer exchange in networks like Torrent, which have been functioning among us for more than a decade.
It is an experiment I would like to try, especially after seeing that the cheer points awarded are almost overwhelmingly granted based on reading time rather than contributions.
I think it’s something interesting to discuss; maybe this can be achieved with simple adjustments to the Discourse core.