The discussion revolves around the need for a site setting to make unlisted topics inaccessible to the public, preventing access via direct URLs or search engine results. rahim123 explains that while unlisted topics are not publicly visible, they can still be accessed if someone has the URL, which is problematic when hundreds of topics need temporary removal. pfaffman suggests moving topics to a private category as a workaround, but rahim123 notes this is impractical due to the difficulty of bulk restoration. pfaffman proposes using deleted topics, which are inaccessible and can be undeleted by staff, but rahim123 highlights the lack of a bulk undeletion feature. rahim123 clarifies that the use case involves a user requesting temporary removal of 300 topics, which should remain hidden until needed again. pfaffman suggests bulk editing via Rails as a possible solution, but acknowledges the complexity.
Hi there, after reading Understanding 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.
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.
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?