Own-topics-only category for draft announcements?

Support
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Here’s the use case:

We have a News & Announcements category. Different members of our community should be able to post announcements. I’d like to have a non-public place where anyone can create a draft, which then will get scheduled [1] to move to the public category.

Right now, this is easy to do if you don’t mind people seeing all the drafts, even for other people’s announcements. Is it possible to make a category where non-staff can create and edit (and see!) their own topics, but not others?

Right now, the best I can think of is to create a group that anyone can message, which when ready would then be moved to the Scheduling category. But that feels like extra hoops. Any better ideas?

  1. I’d like a defined non-admin group to able to do this scheduling, but [that’s an RFE for the Timed Topic feature], I think(How to create a Timed Topic) ↩︎

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That is what I do. I have closed category where group members can publish. After that via wrench moving to public category will be scheduled.

It is not too hard actually.

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But in that case (using a category rather than messages), only members of the selected group can write drafts, and all members of that group can see other drafts, right? That makes sense for a small community with a single core team, but not so much for a big, complicated one.

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Yeah, my bad. I didn’t read properly. My excuse is I don’t know where my reading glasses are right now :smile:

I don’t totally understand that case. Everybody can make drafts that everybody can see before it will be published to another catogory to everybody.

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Or I’m not being clear enough. :slight_smile:

I would like everyone to be able to make drafts, but only the person who created that draft have the permissions to edit it.

Bonus would be Discourse Shared Edits but only for members of a group designated by each topic creator — Design Team, Release Engineering, etc.

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I’m not sure if it will fit your use-case, but I create a pm to myself and build my project in there, and then use a topic timer to schedule publishing (TL4 and above perk, but you could have ‘flag and request’?). Would that be any use?

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Can we nowadays easily find those PMs? Earlier those weren’t at income box.

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You should be able to find them easily. I’ve just created one and can see it at the top of my messages/sent page. :+1:

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And is it so easy to find if and when there is another sended PMs? But the main point is it should be at inbox. And the main-main point is there wouldn’t be need to such trick if we could have more than one draft.

Well, this is off topic, and as old than requests for easier composer :wink:

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Heya Matt! :wave:

Could you explain the pain point here? Is it an issue because there are too many drafts to find what one is looking for? Or perhaps it is weird to have everyone have access to all drafts?

What does current staff do in this regard, drafts category?

I’m interested to figure out a editorial workflow that assists members publishing more! :star_struck:

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Yeah, the latter. And sometimes more than just weird, but spoilery. If all of the drafts are available to everyone before their publication date, their impact as announcements can be lost.

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Oh, interesting! Maybe my idea of having a Discourse group isn’t the worst approach.

I didn’t know that TL4 users could schedule posts. I thought that was moderator (or admin?) only. Could that be added to Understanding Discourse Trust Levels, please?

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