Discourse Private Replies is kinda close
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Thank you and yep its close but not the use case. This one is more a āI start a question and all answers are hidden and just visible for the thread starterā thing.
In our case we have support members which have to log into SFTP/SSH/DB of customers. The customer starts with a question and on 60% of the issues a support member have to ask about the login information. Sometimes another customer is having a similar question and this one also should be allowed to send private information on this thread.
But you donāt want the customers to see each others info. So you have to find a way to distinguish between the posts that should be visible to everyone and the posts that should be visible to staff only. You could split off a topic, use Private Replies and ask the user for their details, but everyone would see the question, which is weird.
But Discourse lets people interact with staff users via PM even if they are disabled, provided that the staff member was the one that initiated the conversation. So you can disable PMās, have staff message your users, and they would be able to reply.
So if your support members are staff then they can just PM your users asking them for the info.
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However, PM only works conditionally well with hundreds of requests a day.
Therefore, it should not be the complete post, which is no longer visible, but in addition to the post a field in which you can pass text (or a link). This field is then only visible to the moderators. Thus, the post creator can always give a public explanation of the problem and also submit login data, which are not visible.
For another Service we use a ticket system, where other users can answer questions beside the support stuff. This is to promote the community idea. There we have a way to implement text-fields below the main content-text-field which submit secure information just for our stuff. So I thought about having such a thing on discourse will be great.