Our Discourse community has a public area that any registered member can participate in. However, I would like to be able to add some members to a group that effectively Silences them from that particular category. However, they would be able to participate in other Categories. What permissions in the Security tab need to be enabled to make it possible to restrict members of one group from creating/replying in a Category while allowing every other registered member to participate?
It is not possible to use security to āExcludeā a group of users, only to āIncludeā, so to achieve this you would need to create a group that would include all users except for the group you do not want to have access.
Full management powers for whatever the group is used in
instructor
30
(limited organizer powers)
include
20
readonly
10
exclude
0
No access
inherit
-1
Inherit actual access level from subgroup
So that means you can actually put groups in groups, and exclude groups from certain things, creating a complex ā or complicated ā way to look at things. IMO this is a bit too fancy, and group exclusion should be enough: THIS permissions if IN GROUP X BUT NOT IN GROUP Y.
Discourse denies by default, with explicit permissions to see, reply and create. You can achieve pretty much any outcome if users are grouped by role or purpose.
Rather than talking about silencing users, tell us what differentiates the two groups:
How are they arriving on your system?
How are they identified?
Do you use SSO or any form of idm?
If youāre able to identify this group to silence, is it any less practical to have a āseeā by default and instead identify and group the users you want to create and respond?
Sure, so they arenāt the groups which grant that right. If thereās a need for a different security partition thereās a need for a different group.
Thereās no native way to maintain a group with all users except for those in another group within Discourse, but as you didnāt answer the questions asked above you might end up baking something yourself, or have to do it the old-fashioned way.
Interesting questions. It would be a pretty substantial change to limit our main forum to āseeā only, and then to identify and group the users who can create and respond. I think the simplest answer, given that this isnāt how Discourse works, is to simply ask this small group of users to refrain from participating in the main categories.
Iāve been reading many topics on this issue, and have a use case where the ability to exclude a group from access (e.g. to a category) would be most useful, in this fashion:
The use case is a Discourse instance dedicated to a fan community (for a multi-book & multi-season TV production) where āspoilersā are an issue; members would like the ability to opt-out of seeing topics belonging to categories that are likely to contain spoilers.