We have successfully been using Discourse as our ticketing system for several months now. All has been going smoothly but I just realized that there is a security issue that I overlooked as it was hidden through obscurity until just now. Everything has been going fine with the exception that I had …

The Private Topics plugin was installed. Two things were going on: all topics were somehow created by the support_staff group and not by the individual users the setting “Private topics permitted groups” (Always show topics started by a member of these groups) included that support_staff group. …

This is exactly why we developed Private Topics Plugin

I’m using that, and it doesn’t seem to be working. [image] tknospdr: even though it’s set up as a private topic and supposed to only be visible to admins and our ‘support_staff’ group.

Can you please share your forum URL in a PM to me, together with a screenshot of the Category → Security tab of that category?

[image] tknospdr: they can see posts from our support category even though it’s set up as a private topic What do you mean by “private topic”? We have “personal messages” but there’s no such concept as a “private topic”. BTW, how you describe things working is exactly how we use meta itself…

[image] supermathie: We have “personal messages” but there’s no such concept as a “private topic”. Please scan up, there is a plug in literally called Private Topics, and that’s what I’m using.

Ah, OK, you should add that information to the OP.

Issue resolved. We did a PR on my brain and now everything is working. I misunderstood a setting in the plugin’s settings. Once I was schooled, everything works like it should. Thanks!

Sudden realization about issue with Ticket System (private topics plugin)

Support

supermathie (Michael Brown) April 9, 2026, 12:56am 11

Explaining the mix-up would make this topic useful to future readers.

With the current amount of detail all we know is “something was wrong and is now fixed”.

7 Likes

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Sudden realization about issue with Ticket System (private topics plugin)

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