I’m excited about your take on forums structure and organization of online communities.
I’m considering using it in the near future for an educational community for children, where children aged 6-17 would be the main users, perhaps a few thousand of them.
Naturally I worry about their online safety, and how Discourse could be used to an advantage over existing forums.
For simplicity considering an all-private discourse forum, what security features are there to keep dangerous people away? Such as requiring an approval or invitation from X number of people before signing in, or the absence of private messages all-around.
I know about the 4 levels of trust already, but this is not enough to protect children, I think.
We did add a “agreed to the terms and conditions” checkbox to new signups for a customer. You would definitely want that here – @neil how can they turn it on?
What @riking said. tos_accept_required is one thing you’ll want to turn on.
Having some parents as moderators, or at least trusted members of the forum, could help too (unless it would stifle conversation to know that parents are reading everything). Education about flagging and how to spot suspicious activity can go a long way.
This would be really good.
Just messages to and from Admins and Mods.
One less thing to worry about if your forum’s a little wild and free to sign up.
I’m also very uncomfortable about the messages being read by admins. The topic was closed I wish it could be reopened.
A Boolean to salt and obfuscate?
As I understand it, mods, and definitely administrators have the means to view private messages between other users. Coupled with some sort of homegrown reporting tool using the API, it should at least be easy to monitor for suspicious activity, particularly if PMs are expected to be a rarity.
Making it clear that you are doing this, or have the ability to do this may very well be enough to make troublemakers reconsider.
Hello did you find an answer to this? We are looking at disabling private messages between our under 18s but still allowing our over 18s to privately message
At the moment unless anyone corrects me is to set U18 at TL1 for example. Set it so that TL1 cannot send messages and TL2 (over 18) will be able to send messages. However, people could lie. In my example, what’s stopping someone from just ticking a box?
I like tihe idea of allowing / disallowing PMs on an individual user level.
Thanks to @martin a while back we introduced personal message enabled groups and direct message enabled groups. This should serve your purpose! You can create a “above-18” group and use it here.
The same thing that prevents them from literally any check at any level you’re doing from just saying “yea I’m 18”.
There’s literally nothing you can do to prove someone is a child that wouldn’t require an extraordinary amount of effort and be required to be utilized on every single person. Even that is simplistic to get around unless you utilize such a level of intrusiveness that no one is going to bother doing it for your webforum anyway.
Your only real options are be incredibly intrusive to the entire community (eg. we randomly check all private messages and block any references to outside communication) or trust people won’t lie and follow your environments in the ideal way
