Does discourse support the concept of a personal note attached to a post by a non-staff user that only the person who wrote it can see?
The use-case I have in mind here is a recipe system, where individuals who use a recipe want to make notes on what they did and how it worked, but not notes they want others to see.
donāt pms work for this? pmās from a userās post reference that post.
i use pmās to myself as a notepad of sorts, especially if i want to reference a post.
Bookmarks allow you to note a purpose, the bookmark icon is highlighted on a topic or reply once set.
yes good point! i use the bookmarks feature too for this sometimes too, especially if some sort of timeliness is required.
Bookmarks donāt seem to be designed to allow much formatting in the explanation for the bookmark. As soon as you hit the return key (ie, to start a new paragraph) the bookmark is created.
As for PMs, I donāt see a direct way to attach a PM to a specific post.
This looks like a brilliant idea, if I were you Iād write a plugin to support thisā¦
It is something Iād consider doing, once Iāve got enough experience with Discourse plugin development to know what to do.
You can use Drafts and/or propose to make this plugin public:
Drafts are very unreliable, because there can be just one per topic. If one starts write a post to such topic it overwrite dratf without warnings.
at first i misunderstood your OP and thought you meant the note was to be shared between the person making the note and the post creator, or to just mark the spot. i see you just basically want a sticky note feature for users to make a personal note on a post, like an extended text bookmark without the time feature. as @Lhc_fl says, this is a good idea and i can see being useful in some instances.
I havenāt played with staff notes yet, but I should look at the code for staff notes to see if extending it for sticky notes to oneself is realistic. Each time I dig into the code I learn a little more and things seem a little less opaque.
i love the user notes feature and so do my mods. we use it a lot.
i could see a plugin called something like āUser Sticky Notesā being somewhat userful. 
The way user notes appear to be implemented, it looks like it would be difficult to modify it to work for personal sticky notes. (The text of the note goes in a json array in the plugin_store_notes table, so it isnāt clear if it can have any formatting. In-house ads are also stored in that table, but they use HTML formatting.)
Also, it doesnāt appear that thereās a way to edit a user note. I suppose it could be deleted and re-posted, though that would change the timestamp.
For me, I would suggest creating a table with three keys:
id, post_id, user_id (corresponding to a user can only record on one post),
and then depending on your idea, you can directly record data on this table, or publish the userās notes as a special post (so that if you do not enable the plugin , the original notes can still be retained)
or maybe use a custom field (which Topic supports).
My first thought is that the sticky note should refer to a specific post, similar to a reply, not just the topic. In a lengthy discussion, I could see a user wishing to have sticky notes attached to several posts in a topic.
Using a sticky_post table has its merits, but there are likely multiple places where it would be necessary to exclude a sticky_post from display or processing beyond just the displaying of a topic, such as when sending emails, and it would be necessary to search the sticky_post table for each post to see if it was a sticky note from this user and thus handled differently than a sticky note made by a different user.
A separate post_type would have merit but that might need to be a part of discourse core, and there may be other issues with that approach of which I am not currently aware.
There are also post custom fields, that might be a better approach than topic custom fields, though it likely has many of the same issues and limitations as a sticky_notes tables, as would putting that information in the plugin_store_notes table.
A combination approach, in which there is a topic custom fields entry that indicates that there are sticky notes in this topic, might have potential. If there are none, then the post custom fields table need not be searched for a sticky note indicator.
Another possibility that would have to be part of core would be to have a āsticky_noteā flag in the posts table.
