# Private users in Discourse **URL:** \ **Category:** Feature\ **Created:** [September 27, 2017, 3:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/private-users-in-discourse/70878 "2017-09-27T15:17:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 5
**Author:** ![tvavrda](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/tvavrda/32/480674_2.png) [@tvavrda](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tvavrda)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2022, 9:09am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/private-users-in-discourse/70878/5 "2022-09-22T09:09:17Z")
Don’t worry, I am not expecting that someone will automatically make Discourse exactly as I wish 🙂 We have been using Discourse for a public forum since 2014. I can say I am a moderately experienced admin. I just decided to also use it as an internal tool for other projects that are not really a community. And since I see and know from other mentions here on meta, that Discourse team is also going this use case direction (as for example Discourse for Teams is), I am just trying to give a little bit of a feedback here. > [@khenmu](#): > > whether you have _a community_ or a _collection of communities_ Neither of that. It’s just using Discourse as a support portal as it perfectly does everything we would expect out of it. The only real thing that makes me uncomfortable is that our different partners and customers could see others. First of all some projects are really not public and second it can just be confusing. > [@khenmu](#): > > I’m also surprised at users _being notified of mentions_ if they don’t have access to the category in which it happened. That sounds like a bug, if you can confirm that it has indeed happened. I tested it and seems that the user mentioned in a category to which they have no access does not get a notification 👍 So by disabling all the different pieces described earlier made it quite good, the only thing remaining is that those users are still appearing when you start mentioning someone. But you cannot message them and you do not see a full name. It’s acceptable but the setting I described would make it perfect 🙂 --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/private-users-in-discourse/70878)._