The discussion revolves around a behavior in Discourse where splitting a topic into a hidden category still makes the topic title publicly visible in the “SPLIT THIS TOPIC” summary post. piffy raised the concern, noting that the permissions of the hidden category are not respected in this case, which is unexpected. sam explains that the split creates a real post with markdown, allowing it to be edited or removed, but acknowledges the confusion. They suggest a potential feature: if the visibility of the destination topic differs from the source, the public post should only state that the topic was split without revealing the destination. piffy agrees that the behavior is surprising and proposes a simpler solution—adding a checkbox to control whether the split message is posted at all, shifting responsibility to the user splitting the topic.
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.
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 Contribute > 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
Add a whisper explaining where topic moved
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.
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
