The discussion revolves around the availability of shared drafts in Discourse, initially limited to staff but potentially extendable to trusted users. eviltrout clarifies that while the feature is currently restricted to staff, it could be expanded to allow users based on trust level or category permissions. Stranik, southpaw, and hellekin advocate for extending the feature to higher trust levels (like TL4) or specific groups, citing use cases in community collaboration, research, and journalism. riking supports the research application. JammyDodger explains that access can be managed by restricting category permissions, allowing only specific groups to create shared drafts, even if others meet the trust level criteria. meglio seeks clarification on group-based access, and JammyDodger elaborates on using category security settings to control access.
Continuing the discussion from Shared Drafts: Allow staff to collaborate on posts before publishing:
Just a question for clarification:
This almost sounds like the feature also works for non-staff users, as long as they have access to the category. But I sssume it’s limited to staff, is it?
For now it is limited in a couple of places by code to staff members… however I did notice while building it that there is no specific reason why it has to work that way.
I think once people are comfortable with the feature, we can just change the “can create shared draft” check to be something along the lines of “can they write to the shared draft category”.
This is a great feature, and if it were extended to TL4, it would be great. After all, users with this level of trust are already full members. There can be many reasons why they will need such functionality.
Chiming to to request extending this to at least TL4.
Our community includes employees and customers. We don’t necessarily want all employees being community “staff” (Admin and Moderators), but would very much like them to be able to create shared drafts.
Given that the Category Group Moderation feature is available to arbitrary groups, it should be possible to extend the Shared Drafts feature to follow the same pattern, eventually enabling various groups to work on shared drafts in private categories and publish later. I can see a lot of good applications coming from this, e.g., in university research or journalism.
+1 to the university (or industry!) research use case - I’ve recently seen collaborative writing software used to great effect on papers.
Has this feature become available to non-staff users since then?
If you search your admin settings you should see the option to enable by Trust Level.
[your_site]/admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=Shared
I saw that. But this is not letting me configure a group whose members should get access. Configuring by level does not solve my problem, unfortunately.
I think that’s done by restricting the category permissons of the category you select for the drafts.
Could you elaborate?
I’m not sure of your specific aim, but if you create a dedicated category for the shared drafts, and limit that to a ‘Shared Draft’ group in the category security tab, then only that group can create a shared draft in there (other users who meet the trust level criteria you’ve set to be able to create shared drafts, but who aren’t in the ‘Shared Draft’ group, will have the button to create a shared draft, but will hit a ‘you don’t have permission to view this resource’ block when trying to create one).