Setup private category for candidate interview process

Support
1

I have seen this thread (How to Use Discourse as a Private Support/Ticket System) and it’s not quite in line with the question. So here’s some background:

I am interviewing candidates to join my team at work as essentially Community Engineers (customer-facing, developer-minded engineers to assist the community, but that’s not important here), and we do a technical exercise as part of the process. Typically we would send them some task to do and then send it back to us. However…

Since they’ll be working in our community Discourse all the time, I was thinking about making an exercise which was pretty real to life. The goal would be to have a private category that only they can see and no one else can. We would then copy in sample questions/threads and have them deal with them accordingly.

What I have done is:

  • Created a separate group that auto joins trust level 1
  • Created a specific user for them to login as and locked that level at 1
  • Created a special category that only they can see/reply

I can’t remove that group from being able to see the other categories though - that’s where this whole experiment seems to die. Any ideas?

2

You can’t. Not unless you make every category private. Public categories are… You know, public.

Based on your question, you want a bunch of users to only be able to see/work in one category without access to others?

EDIT: If this is what you want, how about creating an interview forum sandbox?

4 Likes
3

Well, I can adjust all my categories to not be “everyone” and manually add access to see to all but this specific interview category but that just seems bleh…

So yeah - I want a bunch of users to only be able to see/work in one category… and creating an interview forum sandbox would work. So in theory I could create a new docker instance with special questions, setup, etc. Need to think through the best way to do that in my current environment. Thanks, I hadn’t quite thought about that as a viable option, hoping to avoid that tbh.

1 Like
4

Is it that bad for them to be able to see what the community is like? Why not let them see the actual community? Not letting them see the community that they’ll be managing seems really artificial. That seems like interviewing them without letting them see what the offices on line or meeting their colleagues.

5

Yeah - I guess what I really meant was not be able to reply/create. I also had in my mind that we’ve not moved back to Discourse, so what’s currently there is way out of date

6

Aha. That makes the sandbox solution make more sense.

But if the discourse you have is not being used, then it’s a sandbox. Back it up, do the test, restore to the backup.

7

Yeah - trying to minimize doing things like that since this will be live again soon, and was hoping for a reusable process - which makes the sandbox about the only choice.

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