Hide Staff Notices from non-Staff

[benjamin_bracken]

We have been using Staff Notices feature to add notes for Staff, but I’ve just found out that these are completely visible to non-Staff and that this is an intentional aspect of the feature.

Is there a way to customize our install via CSS, a plugin, or another way to hide all of these from non-Staff?

[Lilly]

Hi @benjamin_bracken welcome to Dicsourse Meta.

I am sorry for the confusion with that feature, but you are correct, that is the intended behaviour - to notify all users of a staff message above a post.

It sounds like you have been using Staff Notices instead of Whispers. perhaps try using that feature because I think it does what you were trying to achieve. you need can make staff the whisper allowed group in your admin - all site settings.

Creating a whisper post

This guide explains how to create a whisper post in Discourse, including how to enable the feature and use it effectively. Required user level: Users in whisper-allowed groups Whispers are a feature in Discourse that allow for private discussion within a topic or personal message. This guide will walk you through enabling and using whispers. Enabling whispers Before whispers can be used, an administrator needs to enable them: Go to your site settings Find…

If you really want to hide staff notices, you can use some CSS, but be aware that it can be overridden in the browser dev console.

[benjamin_bracken]

We also use Whispers I’ll poke around to figure out a way to hide these Notices, but if anyone has any CSS-y suggestions, I’m all ears!

[Lilly]

the CSS will be something like:

.post-notice {
    display: none;
}

you may have to add the CSS for groups component and add a group conditional to the code too but staff should work without it.

but it will hide other post notices, including the welcome new user ones.

[Moin]

For what do you use the staff notes? Maybe there is another feature you can use instead. Hiding with CSS isn’t that safe. It’s quite easy for a user to undo these changes.

[benjamin_bracken]

We used Staff notes for tagging a topic with a link to a ticket in our ticketing system, which we don’t want visible to non-staff.

It appears that something like the following will work for us (thank you @Lilly):

.post-notice.custom {
    display: none;
}

.staff .post-notice.custom {
    display: initial;
}

Agree that this isn’t particularly safe, just need to do something stopgap until we transition away from this usage.

[ToddZ]

The choice to label these “Staff notice” does make it pretty ambiguous: it means “Notice from Staff” but could easily be misunderstood as “Notice to Staff”. An extra word in there could head off such confusion.