Github: GitHub - communiteq/discourse-private-replies
This plugin hides topic replies for everyone but the topic starter and the post author.
Use cases
This can be used for for instance homework assignments where the teacher opens a topic and posts an assignment, and all students make a post with their answers. When everyone has submitted their work, the teacher can open up the answers so the students will be able to discuss them.
A second use case can be an auction where something is offered for sale. People can post their bid and when the sale is done, the topic owner can reveal all bids in order to show the community that everything went according to the rules.
Usage
After installing and enabling the plugin you can turn on the functionality of the plugin on a per-topic basis.
If you are the topic-starter then you will see a new button at the bottom of the topic.
By pressing this button you have enabled the Private Replies feature for this topic.
A banner will appear above the topic and the following happens:
- people will only be able to see posts made by themself, by the topic owner, and by users in selected groups.
- only the topic owner will be able to see all posts.
By pressing the button a second time, the topic will revert back to normal.
The plugin will, when enabled, allow private replies on all topics. However, if the setting private replies on selected categories only is enabled, the plugin can be enabled per category in the category security settings.
In that same screen you can also find the setting to enable private replies by default for all new topics in that category. This is especially handy when topics are being submitted by email.
Settings
private_replies_participants_can_see_allif enabled, anyone who participated in the topic can see all repliesprivate_replies_min_trust_level_to_see_allpeople with this trust level or higher can see all repliesprivate_replies_groups_can_see_allusers in these groups can always see all replies (default: staff)private_replies_see_all_from_groupsposts from users in these groups are always visible to everyone (default: staff)private_replies_topic_starter_primary_group_can_see_allusers in the same primary group as the topic owner can see all replies
Caveats
The plugin disables the following ways to retrieve the post contents:
- topic view (i.e. the regular way of looking at posts)
- user profile - activity
- search
- raw (/raw/topic_id/post_id)
However, you can still find out who posted in the topic:
- The topic list icons will still show who has posted in the topic.
- You will also be able to see ‘user xxx is replying’ at the bottom of the topic.
- The topics are also visible in the user profile - summary.
However, all of these do not reveal the contents of the post.
Background:
So my SO is a teacher (ancient Greek and classical Latin) and has been using Discourse in her classes for a number of years now. She uses it mainly to distribute assignments to her students and discuss them afterwards. However, all the assignments are being handed in on paper during her classes.
Until now - since the schools have been closed because of all the corona panic she is moving to 100% online teaching, including the assignments. So all those students are currently e-mailing their work to her. This is very sub-optimal since it requires her to do quite a lot of administration (and I can tell you she is not very good at those kind of things 
).
We were discussing a few options and she said: “why can’t I have a topic where people can only see my posts (i.e. the posts made by the topic starter) and their own posts? This would allow me to post an assignment as a topic and have every student post their answers below it without being able to see all the other answers. Then when everybody has entered their work and it is time to discuss, I want to be able to press a button to make the veil go away and make all posts in the topic visible to everyone, so they can all see and discuss each others work.”
Yes - brilliant! (that’s why I love her). So I made a plugin for this. Previous discussion here: Topic replies invisible until topic owner decides to reveal them?
