# Private vs public site and sharing topic links

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/private-vs-public-site-and-sharing-topic-links/59322>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [Março 17, 2017, 1:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/private-vs-public-site-and-sharing-topic-links/59322 "2017-03-17T01:23:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![Shrike](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/shrike/32/68103_2.png) [@Shrike](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Shrike)\
**Post date:** [Março 17, 2017, 1:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/private-vs-public-site-and-sharing-topic-links/59322/1 "2017-03-17T01:23:46Z")

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Hi.

I have a little bit controversial idea. I have a forum where it’s hard to decide for me whether it should be private or public (I mean should it require login for reading). What is for private: I want to see who uses it, it’s kind of a local community so it’s not much sense in anonymity. But being private for the forum has a strong consequence - it’s not possible to share deep links in social networks (FB and the like). That’s bad. That’s so bad that I doubt about keeping it private.

So the idea is: would it be possible to allow sharing topic links and keeping auth required? It’s possible to detect FB-crawler (which requests topic page for making a preview) and let it pass. Indeed it won’t be strictly private after that as anyone can pretend he’s a FB-crawler. But I don’t need strict security for reading here.

It could be the 3rd mode after public/private - require login for reading, but allow previews/sharing.

What do you think?

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