I just noticed it is possible to tweet or share on facebook links to private topics, in categories that are not publicly visible. Should this not be disabled? Discouraged?
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Depends who you are sharing them with. Maybe you have a facebook page for your private Discourse. I don’t know how you could expect a private site of any kind to suppress copy and pasting of the URLs, either.
Yes. You are right about that. But the “social sharing” links can lead to some confusion. May not be a big deal.
You can’t prevent someone from sharing a link that is private. There are at least 4 different ways to get that link. Doesn’t seem worth the hassle to hide it (and the confusion to users part of private categories when it goes missing).
Not to mention it could be a teaser and be incentive for them to sign up. But I agree, anyone can still get the URL from anywhere else, but simply not served on a proverbial platter. As long as the security continues to deny access to non-members or members with insufficient privs, then all is well.
One possibility would be to remind the user that clicks the share button.
Something like:
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Thanks for the thoughts on this. In our community we are still wrapping or heads around levels of access and what should be public and what private, and how it actually works. Many members are forum newbies and don’t really fully understand what they are doing and who they are talking to. Right now everything is private as we seed topics and figure everything out, but some categories will be opened up to the public.
Discourse does not fully handle this aspect for our site and assumes posts are either public or that members are savvy and understand what is public and what is private. For example, categories can be private to groups but discourse doesn’t have functionality to show who has access to the category. This sharing feature is another example.
Not necessarily a problem but we will have to figure out what we need to pay attention to and what needs to be documented and explained and where.