Splitting a topic to a hidden category makes title public

[piffy]

Hidden Split Topics

Please create a new feature that will hide the public link at the bottom of a split thread if the topic has been split to a forum only visible by staff and moderators. In my community we split off comments which derail the topic discussion into a staff only forum for tracking as opposed to deleting posts. However in Discourse it not only shows to the public what the name of the new split thread is in the staff only forum, it provides a link to the thread. To me this info at the bottom of a li…

I came across this situation today where posts were split into a new topic in a hidden section with a new short and… uh blunt title not realizing the title would be publicly visible (in the “SPLIT THIS TOPIC” summary that gets created)

I was suprised to find the permissions of the hidden category are not respected in this case. This is not really a high priority issue and a “solution” exists (delete the summary message). I guess I’m just concerned that this situation exists at all. If I didn’t check if the new topic title was visible in a private window, my default assumption was that only staff could see it.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@piffy

I was suprised to find the permissions of the hidden category are not respected in this case. This is not really a high priority issue and a “solution” exists (delete the summary message). I guess I’m just concerned that this situation exists at all. If I didn’t check if the new topic title was visible in a private window, my default assumption was that only staff could see it.

I agree it is a bit surprising:

The key here though is that the post we create is a real post with real markdown.

This means you can remove it if you don’t want the link around, add a whisper and so on.

I would say it is up to the operator to decide what to do here. That said I am open to having a #feature request here that improves default usability.

• IF a topic is split
• AND the people who can view destination topics <> people who can view source topic
• THEN
  1. Add a whisper explaining where topic moved
  2. In the public post only mention that it was split, not where it was split

It is a rather complicated feature to build for a tiny edge case though.

[piffy]

I better understand the complexity required now.

The primary issue is that the behavior is unexpected, so a simpler solution could be to shift the responsibility more obviously onto the user splitting the topic.

For example, having a checkbox on this screen of whether to post the “topic has been split” message at all could be a solution