Discourse provides a feature out of the box to filter a topic on a specific user:
However, sometimes you are not just interested to see the replies of a single person, but those of an entire group. On this meta forum, you might want to see a filtered list of all the responses from the team group when reading through a longer feature request / bug report, or an announcement, for example.
On our own forum instance, we also put out announcements for new features and upcoming changes often, and due to the fact that we have a very large community, the staff responses are often hard to find back among the replies of other users. Since our staff group has a couple of hundred users, the way of filtering a topic on just one specific user isn’t really convenient for our users, since they don’t know which admin users actually responded to the topic and so they don’t know what to filter on. They would need to scroll through the entire topic. We do have a staff flair to make it easy to spot these responses, but sometimes our announcements can get up to a couple hundred posts long in a short time span.
It would be great if there was a way to filter on posts from a group, in a way that naturally extends the UX of the existing per-user filter.
The way I have in mind that this would work is that, when you click the group name / title on someone’s name, you get the popup of their primary group, and can then hit the filter button on that group card:
We’re a company with 1000+ employees and sometimes we have multiple announcements going on at the same time where our people are responding. In addition to that, we have bug triagers and engineers responding to bug reports made in a separate category. Then there’s also product managers commenting on things in a feature request category. Overall, the view would be pretty cluttered and not in order of the topic being discussed.
Additionally, we don’t want to expose a list of all of our staff accounts, so we have the group on private. Putting group members on private means that Discourse no longer populates the Activity tab with anything from users in that group it seems, it only shows group mentions. We’ve had issues before where malicious users would look for recently joined staff as easier phishing / social engineering targets. (It’s fine if people can see who is staff by going directly to their profile, we just want to make it harder to fetch the whole list)
Basically we want it for the same reasons there is a “filter by user” option: we would like users to have the UX option to filter out responses from our engineers from a long thread of excited users asking questions / cheering for an update. And first going to a user/group profile and then trying to find all of the posts they made in a particular topic is inconvenient because you potentially need to look through many pages and might miss information.
Hope this helps! I’d link our group page on our forum, but as mentioned above it is private for security reasons.
This does sound like a very valid feature request, especially given the challenges you’ve outlined!
With that said, I’m thinking we will need to see more interest from the community (or even better our hosted customers) before we can consider putting something like this on the Discourse core road map.
If you want to guarantee a solution in the short term, you could always create a listing in the #marketplace to get a quote from a developer on how much it would cost to build a custom plugin. This is assuming your hosting situation allows the installation of custom plugins.
