There is a staff tags setting you can make use of, that limit a tag to only be used by staff. And if that tag is only used in private categories, it would prevent others from seeing them. But I think that is as close as you’ll get with this.
So the posts are public, but you want that they are connected to be private. From what @cpradio says, it sounds like hidden tags work only in hidden categories.
How about you reply as linked topic to a hidden category? That might not let your stats easily enough, though.
I was thinking it would be possible to still use the same tags, just add a bool flag, e.g. “Staff only”, false by default. But yeah I realise it is not a trivial improvement. Maybe one day…
We run our community forum primarily to provide support for users of our software. It would be great if we could use the same private tags that our colleagues use in the support tickets they handle. This way we could make our reporting unified, regardless of the platform the requests arrive from.
Do you understand well that whisper_staff_tags would be the feature we need? Is it something you’d consider implementing in the future?