Hi @sam,
I haven’t personally customized any of the forum.
Whilst I am sure it would hide things in the way you describe, it doesn’t seem overly straight forward.
The screenshots from the issue raised above suggest built in functionality to not make a group public, and limit the specific access to a group, it seems odd, to me at least, that you cannot then search for that specific group in the way described which works across the rest of the sight.
I fully appreciate I have limited experience with Discourse so am invariably missing something.
Can you explain to me again why having this functionality would be so bad, I am trying to get my head around what you said in your previous reply about people’s permissions and posts being moved around etc?