Splitting a topic to a hidden category makes title public

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.

3 Likes

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.

2 Likes

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