We had a conversation on email but it’s best we keep it here.
A year ago, I’ve developed a plugin that can hide content unless replied to the thread. You can find it here: GitHub - erickguan/discourse-reply-required · GitHub
It allows a special markup like [reply-required][/reply-required] to encapsulate a content. The content reveals until the user replies to the thread. But it doesn’t hide information to search engines.
Along the way, I felt it’s cumbersome to design it even I had a client who used it extensively. Mainly reasons are:
- Visual clutter and has nothing to do with cultivating community, even though it looks like people engage.
- It takes quite effort to hide the information. And it takes more time to even load content. How does that benefit to community since content is the key.
For the very same reason, we have stopped to invest on it.
Despite the story, the plugin can be tweaked to work.