# Discourse for Private Communities

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-for-private-communities/56480
**Category:** Blog
**Created:** [January 27, 2017, 6:21pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-for-private-communities/56480 "2017-01-27T18:21:10Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![erlend\_sh](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/erlend_sh/32/119475_2.png) [@erlend\_sh](https://meta.discourse.org/u/erlend_sh)
#### Post date: [January 27, 2017, 6:21pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-for-private-communities/56480/1 "2017-01-27T18:21:10Z")

</div>

Originally published at: [Discourse for Private Communities](https://blog.discourse.org/2017/01/discourse-for-private-communities/)  
   
There are many reasons why a community might be private: Paid memberships; a company intranet; a sensitive subject matter; beta testers; a grassroots movement building momentum before going public. Whatever the reason, we want Discourse to function well in private contexts. We reached out to 23 private Discourse communities to learn more about their use…

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![mcwumbly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mcwumbly/32/103861_2.png) [@mcwumbly](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mcwumbly)
#### Post date: [January 29, 2017, 4:51pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-for-private-communities/56480/2 "2017-01-29T16:51:30Z")

</div>

An opportunity I see for making Discourse continue to improve for private communities (particularly company intranet sites), is to have more integrations with _other_ private systems

The [slackdoor](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-slackdoor-plugin/44632) plugin gives Slack some ability to unfurl links to private discourse instances, but going the other way would be cool too (i.e., having the ability to Onebox links to private Slack instances).

Same goes for things like Google Docs. The [current solution](https://meta.discourse.org/t/google-docs-onebox-gem-requires-a-published-document/33649/22) is better than it used to be, but it’d be great if Discourse could be configured to have the necessary authorization to actually fetch and onebox private docs.

These are just a couple examples that come to mind - I imagine each private instance would have their own thoughts on what integrations like this would be valuable.
