I would like to support this. My use case - I have a group of “limited” users; I want them to be able to read most categories, but write only in one, let’s call it “starting cat.”.
I can of course use existing solution (and trust levels of course), but if I want to have more fine-grained permission system, it gets hectic.
Instead of setting up permissions like this:
display: everyone
post: everyone NOT greenhorns
I have to do something like this:
display: everyone
post: Group 1
Group 2
(...and basically each and every other group...)
reply: Group a
Group b
(...and once again...)
@robmc, looks like Jeff recategorized this already. Unless I’ve misread this, your request is the same as mine (linked above, long before I joined the Discourse team). Do you mind if the topics are combined, or do you feel yours is different?
Well, our use cases are similar, but our current proposed solutions look a little different
I don’t mind combining them at all, but I think that your original proposal was to have a single category for putting members into that would stop them being in ‘everyone’ but I would prefer to have logic in the security that allowed us to use “IS NOT” (or can’t / exclude) in the same way we use “IS” (or Can) as I think this would give more flexibility
They are similar issues, but not quite the same and it is possible that a single technical solution would address both, but I’m not sure. Happy to put them together to explore it though
I’m not precious … just wanting to help make this even better for everyone
So my usecase at the time was a single category that I needed to restrict access to, but the solution is the same as you suggested: an “exclude” or “not” security permission for categories.
Having Add+Subtract moves the system into a whole range of potential conflicts requiring resolution. At the least, the order of putting in permissions will now be significant, and so there will necessitate a reorder function to move things up/down.
Otherwise, there is no way to resolve potential conflicts when a person:
is in more than one group
one group is permitted access
another group is denied access
EDIT: Or you can say Add always trumps Subtract, or vice versa. Nevertheless, it makes things very hard to understand.
Although I can understand the pain you’re going through in order to request this… I have tons and tons of groups and each category’s permissions list is like 15 long, just to do what you’re looking to do – that is, to exclude a particular group from access while opening to most others.
Since all sites are currently like yours, it might be that the solution is to have two steps / sections … the first is the INCLUSION (which is the current context, so even if the change is made nothing is affected) where you build up a total population to view this, then a second step below would be the EXCLUSION which would remove a portion of those that matched certain criteria.
There is also a need for intersection, meaning that the permission is only for users with two or more groups set.
For example, Sales & USA ==> any user having both the group Sales and USA. Then this combo should have access to USA Sales Leads category. In other words, the group is the “intersection” of a number of groups. Currently, the permission system works on the “union” of listed groups.
This will solve neatly the common headaches of setting up permission with sub-categories (where in many cases, the users permitted into the sub-categories will only be among the ones permitted into the parent category). It is necessary because, in Discourse, sub-categories do NOT inherit permissions.
