Setting option to make unlisted topics inaccesible to public

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Continuing the discussion from Best way to temporarily remove public access to a user's topics?:

Hi there, after reading The difference between Closed, Unlisted and Archived topics it seems like there is still a gap in functionality for unlisted topics that may need to be restored as normal topics in the future, but for the time being should not be publicly accessible at all (either from participating users clicking the link in an old notification email or search engine results that haven’t been updated yet). It seems like a good idea to add a site settings option to prevent public access to unlisted topics, i.e. throw a 404 when anybody except the site administrator visits the URL.

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Maybe you really want the feature and not a workaround, but the workaround is to move it to a private category.

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Hi Jay, unfortunately that’s not feasible in the case of hundreds of topics, because it would require manually or programmatically reverting them back to their previous revision to put them back in the correct category.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Best way to temporarily remove public access to a user’s topics?

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Here’s another try. Deleted topics are not accessible and can be undeleted by staff.

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Hi Jay, yep, but the difficulty there is no bulk un-deletion:

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What is your use case that you delete/hide hundreds of posts and then want to undelete them?

It should be possible to bulk delete from rails if you’re self hosted.

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I have a long-time user that requested temporary removal of all of their topics (about 300 in number) due to a specific personal reason. If their situation changes those topics will need to be restored in the future. While the topics are in the removed state the topics should not be publicly accessible even if somebody has the URL, and they are all currently indexed on the search engines. So the only way I could find to make them publicly inaccesible in a bulk way was deleting them. (I chose not to move them to a private category because it seemed even more daunting to later restore each topic to its previous category in a programmatic / bulk way, and it seems more useful to ask for the settings option in this topic and/or Bulk un-deletion rather than a bulk revision revert feature.)

Interesting. What’s your take on this perspective?

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You’re not going to get a feature in time.

It shouldn’t be that hard to bulk move them all to a private category as a edit in rails and later revert those edits.

I don’t know how to do it off hand.