Private group specifications on Discourse

Product Support

AI-generated summary

A user is seeking help with customizing private group specifications on Discourse. They have private groups with separate categories, using SSO with Wordpress, and an automatic join feature. However, they need more options to control user interactions, including:

  • Limiting users to seeing and messaging only members in their group
  • Restricting users to viewing public profiles of members in their group
  • Customizing the user list to only show members of their own group

pfaffman suggests that current options are limited, and the user can either turn off user profiles or allow everyone to see them. Possible solutions include:

  • Creating a plugin to override the user list or hide users from other groups
  • Using a theme component to hide users that don’t match the user’s group
  • Setting up a separate forum for each group using multisite
1

Hi,

In a project, we are using private groups with SSO feature. We are using Wordpress as SSO provider. Our all user groups are private and each group can display a separate category. These groups and categories are completely independent of each other.

Also, we are using automatically join group feature for joining these groups and it works correctly.: “Users who register with an email domain that exactly matches one in this list will be automatically added to this group”

Discourse’s default user groups specifications are is not offering enough options at this time for that.

What we need:

  1. Users can only see members in their group and send messages.
  2. Users can only view public profiles of members in their group.
  3. Users can only see members in their own group in user list. (not disable user directory, just customize that for user groups.)

What can we do? I am happy to hear your suggestions.

Thanks.

2

Not much. Your easy options are to either turn off user profiles so that no one can see any profiles or allow people to see all of them.

A plugin could probably override the user list or hide users who are not in the same primary group as the user looking. If it would be OK for the other users to be in the JSON load, it might be possible for a theme component to hide users that don’t match the user’s group.

This is something that comes up from time to time.

If you really want people not to see anyone else your best bet is a separate forum for each group. You could do it with multisite, so there’s still be only a single container.