Hi All,
I’m considering the use of Discourse at my organisation and wanted to get advice about how users can create private groups/topics/chats.
My use case is, I want to have public open forums, but the ability for users to create a topic or chat and limit who can see and use this topic.
E.g
Automative forum (open)
Any help would be appreciated!
You can do all these things using category settings and custom groups.
There are several topics that deal with these configurations, just use internal research
Basically you can create an “Audi Australia” group and you can configure the group so that users can enter only if approved by the owners of the group or only if users register with a particular email domain (e.g. audi.australia@your.site.com).
After that you need to create an “Audi Australia” category and you have to configure the permissions to “create see and reply” only for the “Audi Australia” group.
No one outside the group “Audi Australia” will see that category or see the topics that belong to that category (except for the staff of course).
All the categories with the “everyone can create reply and see” permissions will be public
You can create groups (collections of users) and give them access to categories. The group owner can control membership.
It requires an admin to set stuff up.
Thanks for the responses, is there any way to allow the users to do this? Similar to creating a channel on Slack.
No, users can’t create groups and categories. However, they can (usually) create PMs, and invite whoever they want to those, but they’re not “in a category” in the usual sense.
You also consider that the creation of automatic groups by users can be deleterious.
You could have dozens of groups dealing with the same theme that have a similar name.
Paradoxically, your users could create:
before realizing that there is already an Audi Australia group. Or worse, a user could join the group, find users he does not like and create an Australia Audi group etc…
The simplest thing instead is:
In this way every user can self-manage himself.
Can the chat/channel also be limited to that group of users and regulated by admin of that group?
Yes.
When an admin creates a chat channel, it must be associated with a category. The channel will then inherit the security settings of the category it is linked to, so if group X has access to category Y, then it will also have access to channel Y (either being added automatically or joining the channel manually, depending on the settings given to the channel).
Channels linked to public categories will be open to all users, just like the category itself.
This plugin if Self hosted might help with some of the functionality your looking for.
Combined with groups and category security settings you can have topics in a category that are managed by the Op. Use groups to limit who can can create topics for discussion can le
Members in the admin group could also be owners in the General group
In Category settings there is a setting to show a message if a person cannot post. So if Category has security setting
Everyone See
You can have a pop up message that has a link to apply to a group.
