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 is useful when internal teams want to collaborate privately within a topic, such as when discussing how to best address a member’s question in a support topic.
Enabling whispers
To enable whispers in your community, go to Admin > Group permissions or All site settings and search for whisper allowed groups. Update this setting with the groups that should be able to read and write whispers.
Creating a whisper
If you belong to a group in the whispers allowed groups setting, you can create a whisper post by clicking the composer action menu in the top left corner and selecting Toggle whisper or by clicking Visible in the top right corner to toggle to whisper mode.
You will notice that the text will be italicized and the composer action button will change from Reply to Whisper to reinforce that you’re now whispering.
Additional information
- Replying to a whisper will automatically bring up the composer with the whisper option toggled on.
- There is no built-in UI to convert a whisper to a normal post or vice versa after it has been posted. However, staff members can change the post type via the API (
PUT /posts/:id/post_type). - The Toggle Whisper theme component can be installed to add another UI button for converting between whispers and normal posts.
Last edited by @lindsey 2026-10-09T17:23:49Z
Last checked by @hugh 2024-07-08T10:47:00Z
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