New category permission : "Create and see"

(Oliver Jones) #15

We’ve been thinking about using Discourse as a support forum solution for our product. We need a similar feature where TL0 (new) users should be able to post a topic into a “Private Support” category. This category should be visible to all users but topics posted into the category should only be visible to the original poster and “staff” (or some other blessed group).

Without this feature I don’t think we can use Discourse as a product support solution. Sometimes people want to request support but don’t want to do so in a public way. They could just send us an email but then that makes it difficult for a group of people who can respond to know what other support staff have said.

Group private messages could also solve this problem but:

  1. Trust Level 0 users can’t send PMs.
  2. There is no “send private message to group” action when viewing a group.
Private messages to a group, or other means to handle private support requests
(Kevin P. Fleming) #16

Sure, and as you can see that’s been discussed before. It’s a different use case though, it’s a bit more like private messaging than Q&A.

(Oliver Jones) #17

Yeah, a Q&A platform might be a better fit for our use case. It is just annoying to have two different systems for Q&A/Support and general User-to-User discussions. Nicer when one system can fit both models reasonably well and I think with only minor changes to Category permissions Discourse would do the trick.

(Leonard Garvey) #18

I have a use case for this. I’m running a gaming forum (for a guild) and we’d like to have the ability to accept applications to join the guild.

  1. Applications need to be private. The public should see no applications.
  2. Applications need to be visible to the thread creator.
  3. Applications need to be able to be visible to a particular group (guild members or officers).

I’ve been digging around the permission code in the discourse backend but it’s still a touch tricky to get my head around. If anyone could give me some pointers that would definitely make things easier.

Edit: After playing around with this idea for a few hours, while I’d like to see it there appear to be a few serious roadblocks that make this concept pretty tricky to pull off as a plugin so I’m hesitant to continue unless this would be something that would be merged into discourse as a whole:

  1. There’s a very strong relationship between being able to see a category, and being able to see the topics in that category. This assumption is coded in several of the guardians.
  2. There aren’t really any extension points in the guardian code so I’d need to monkey patch several methods both in the category guardian and in the topic guardian.
  3. I’d need to add a new permission enum value (4) which would break a plugin if discourse ever decided to make their own extra permission, this could cause some “interesting” data errors.

While I’ve managed to get most of it working by just hacking the discourse code (I haven’t gotten it filtering the topics in the protected category) I don’t want to continue since deploying this code isn’t really something I could easily do.

User Invitation/Poking a user to a topic is now live!
(Sam Saffron) #19

I would like to slot this to a release @codinghorror its kind of critical for anyone migrating off zendesk

"Create" Permission
(Dave McClure) #20

If this is low hanging fruit, go for it.

But if it’s already tricky and the support ticket use case us under serious exploration, I am not sure the category permission paradigm is the best place to start.

It may be worth exploring enhancements to the private messaging feature to enable these workflows.

The flexibility to add (or remove) additional recipients on either end was always something helpful for us when using any system for support tickets.

A few more thoughts here, but I could say more if that’s really the goal.

"Create" Permission
(Stephen) #21

Would really love to see this too. The simplified permissions model is usually a boon but for this one case.

We could kill off several other tools/services overnight if this were implemented, particularly if users had the ability to create threads in a particular category and only see the threads they’ve created.

(Jeff Atwood) #22

I would like to see better group mentions and PMs.

"Create" Permission
(Sam Saffron) #23

Perhaps a search filter + minor change will give us a large amount of this request …

  • Allow users to easily create PMs to a group (without expansion hacks that are used with the @mention stuff) - never been a fan of the expansion hacks.

  • Allow for a search filter to:GROUP_NAME to see all PMs sent to a particular group in the full screen UI

Together I think this would cover the sentiment behind the original request.

"Create" Permission
(Dave McClure) #24

Could also later explore things like a tabs on your own messages page for messages to groups you belong to:

my-groups-messages.png740×1112 171 KB

and/or the group page itself:

group-messages.png668×612 57 KB

(Stephanie) #25

That PM thing would be great. On Imgur Community it can be hard to find my personal conversations in the sea of flag-initiated PMs. It could also help address the problem with admins being deluged with their copy of outgoing Welcome messages.

(Stephen) #26

Following up on this one, is it still planned? Or easily achieved? We’re approaching the point where the products I mentioned are up for renewal, if Discourse is going to offer a ‘create and see’ permission then now would be a great time to know :smiley:

(Sam Saffron) #27

“Create and See” works fine today, you simply create messages to a group. If you emails team@discourse it create a message that our team can read and reply to. It even stages a user for the person who sent the email.

(Stephen) #28

How do we streamline that process for the original purpose though?

If we want users to create new threads for support, are we asking them to manually enter the group they want assistance from?

(Felix Freiberger) #29

You can give out links like this one:

https://meta.discourse.org/new-message?title=topic%20title&body=topic%20body&username=fefrei

(Michael Downey) #30

That doesn’t seem to work for groups, though, AFAICT. I get “Sorry an error has occurred” when trying it with the username=team here on meta, and the same error for a group of which I’m a member on my on Discourse site.

(Jeff Atwood) #31

@techapj can you take a look at the above?

(Arpit Jalan) #32

Composing a pre-filled message to group was not supported, but now it is via:

So to compose a new pre-filled message for group, use this URL:

https://meta.discourse.org/new-message?title=topic%20title&body=topic%20body&groupname=team

Notice groupname param in above URL, this means that you want to create a new pre-filled message for a group (as opposed to username for composing a message for user).

(Sam Saffron) #33

I am closing this cause this is now implemented using “group inboxes”

You define a group as the people who are allowed to process the topic list and then allow it to accept messages from any user in the forum.

Effectively this gives you “create and see”

  • Any user can create a message to the group

  • All members of the group can see the message (and archive if needed)

Suggestion: New permissions - allow Topic starter and Group members (eg mod team) to view/reply
Limit post replies in a category?
(Sam Saffron) #34