Continuing the discussion from How do I create a whisper post?:
Whispers could be useful to expand, similar to the newly in-development functionality for group-specific canned replies, to also allow multiple whispers (specific to certain groups).
Example:
We have a @documentation-group which could make use of whispers without needing access to staff whispers as well.
It would be useful to optionally allow more than one section of whispers. Thanks either way for considering.
I believe group access to whispers was added recently:
But all groups would be able to see all whispers. I think siloed whispers would be a good addition, though I don’t know how difficult it would be to achieve. 
Don’t suppose this has come up amongst your team in the two years that have passed? 
We are beginning to integrate other teams to the platform that would like to utilize the whisper feature, but we don’t want them seeing our admin whispers.
I’m afraid when I raised it it was deemed VeryComplex™, and so far hasn’t picked up too much interest.
This feature request might be of interest as an alternative
It’s similar but different. I don’t think we would want the other group to be able to see our admin whispers under any conditions. Here is a little visualization hopefully it helps—think of it as layers of whispers:
If a bbcode plugin or theme component would not affect whispers.
In the link I provided you would have extra code available in a post to only show part of the post to everyone with the hidden content only shown to Op & target group.
Now though so ppl couldn’t view post revisions except stafff.
The idea of a bbcode like solution would allow you to hide content within a post to another group. The one example is tabletop RPGs. However clever users could view though using inspect element and change the CSS.
I think the feature request is quite clear and we should be careful about not treating everything as a support topic and going too deep into workarounds. Let’s try and keep it focused. 
Are you imagining that internal team A can see internal team B’s whispers?
Or that each internal team can only see their own team’s whispers?
Or that a given whisper needs to define its recipients somehow?
When would you choose to use a whisper vs. a PM to manage recipients?
(Replying as @putty’s teammate)
Ideally the latter, but I realize the grouping of different users in different groups could be quite complex. The idea is that we have many internal teams at our company that are now looking to build experiences for their users on our Discourse, too. It feels sort of like we’ve built a parent community, but they’re also building mini communities within.
With this, many of them are interested in the ability to use the whisper feature in their group inboxes and categories. The issue of course, is that we don’t want them seeing administrative whispers.
OK, I hear you.
It’s tricky. Whispers are already a tool that are a little dangerous in that the people who can see them have to make sense of a topic on two levels, squinting to see it from the point of view of the public while also seeing the privileged view that includes whispers.
I think adding an additional layer may make that too confusing for most people. I acknowledge that email basically gives you this freedom already as many clients will show a single thread regardless of who is being added or dropped from the cc list along the way. But I’ve also seen that lead to the same kind of confusion I’d like to avoid here.
One idea that I think might strike the right balance is to make whisper visibility a category level configuration. For example:
In that model, X and Y would still be able to see admin whispers in A. But I think you could define categories and norms in a way that would work, without having to add a third layer of whispering within a single topic.
What would you think about the idea of:
as @putty described. That would be a great compromise because, at least in our instance, at least everyone in “all other whispers” would be employees of the same company. I’m taking a leap here but feel I’m learning the complexities of the platform more every day: I assume if this were the configuration, it would be (at least somewhat) less complex than giving individual groups the ability to control who can see their whispers?
This would give employees company wide the ability to whisper in the community amongst each other regardless of category, topic, or PM. This actually sounds incredible to me now that I think about it. This would be incredible!
Yeah, I’m not sure which would be more complex in the end to implement and configure. I’m still concerned about having a third level of discussion within the same topic, though.
You could do this today, though, eh? As long as you were OK with also letting all employees see whispers from admin, that is.
Is it worth considering accepting that constraint?
What are the scenarios where you’d need an admin to be able to whisper and not have it visible to all employees? And wouldn’t you at least sometimes want admins to be able to whisper to other employees if you’re letting other employees whisper to each other? How would that work?
Maybe in the “all employees can whisper amongst each other” model, admins should use a different tool to communicate with each other when they need to do so privately (like PMs or a staff only category or chat channel). If that were acceptable, you could do this today.
Unfortunately we also need to administer our internal users too, at times! When you start getting so big, there arise scenarios that are equally as fitting of an admin-only discussion. I could tell you more about this use case in a DM, should you be interested.
Yes!
e.g. staff would see this:
and employees would see this:
Those are just some Frankenstein screenshots, but I think that gives the gist.
Yep, I think that gives the gist.
I am still doubtful about the value/complexity tradeoff here, but I understand now how having one additional type of whisper would accomplish what you’re asking for now.
Given the existing constraints of the system, would you choose to allow everyone to whisper and use another solution for the admin only conversations? Or would you choose to keep whispers restricted to admins only?
It’s hard to decide at the moment. The philosophy I always have my team follow is to do what’s best for our users, not what’s easiest for us, because it will eventually be what’s best for us too.
With that, I guess I’d probably leave whispers open to everyone, and have my team move moderation conversations to Slack or maybe chat when the notification issues get fixed. It’s not ideal and takes whispering away from mods/admins, but it would allow us to continue to grow our community.
+1 for this feature!
In our case we have a non-moderator team of authors and other contributors and I would like to give them the option to whisper in certain categories without making staff/mod whispers visible for them.
It wouldn’t be secure. And crafty users could circumvent it.
But what about a theme component that uses CSS to display none on a whisper created by Staff if current user is not staff? As for certain categories.
A similar logic could be used to on the whisper toggle in the gear menu to not display whisper button for said group if not categories you want them to be allowed to use whispers.
The Staff group would need to know not share things of a real sensitive/security need.
Something like this could be used as an interm workaround with caveats.
Hmmm … how so?
As long as this is implemented in the back end, the Posts streamed to the client would depend on the users specific authorization.
“Non-admin whispers” would not be included in the serialized information to those not privy to them.
If there are any impediments to implementing this, I don’t think that’s one of them.
I was Just going by a simple CSS in a theme component.
Wouldn’t that need to be a plugin? I apologize if my fuzzy logic is off.
However you have much better understanding of these things than myself. But sounds cool if doable as earlier in this topic it was said to make seperate whispers would not be possible at this time due to complexity.
I was basing my conclusion on the idea in another topic of using a generic bbcode CSS to only show hidden content in a post to say a certain user or group.
