Unlisted topics notify users if their posts are linked

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

Hi @Stephen !

@Stephen

What’s the use case here? How are you trying to use Unlisted Topics?

Our use case scenario in this instance is that as a club, we run a series of challenges and competitions for our club members.

Often, we (the club committee members) will draft a new topic in advance of the challenge start date and post it as an Unlisted topic, so only our club committee members can see it.

Then, on the given day, we Unlist the topic in order to unveil it to the world

@Stephen

The topic is still there and respects the ACLs set on the category it’s placed in.

Yup, understood.

@Stephen

Unlisted public topics are available to anyone with the link

Also understood

@Stephen

If you link it from another topic, that link is obviously going to work, it will behave like normal.

I agree.

The issue here is the opposite of this.

We never link to unlisted topics, because we’re fully aware they’ll then be ‘out in the wild’.

The action of us linking to a ‘Listed’ topic has in turn made the Unlisted topic reveal itself to the people that posted the topics to which we linked / referenced.

If I can give you a working example from earlier today

Earlier this morning we created this topic, and we ensured it was flagged as Unlisted at the time of posting it. We have always been under the impression only the admins could see it (and of course, anyone else who had the link, even non-members). But as we never share the link, it was always considered safe.

So in our new and Unlisted topic are a series of links to ‘examples’ (normal ‘listed’ topics elsewhere on our site), so people are clear on the requirements of our competition.

The blue ‘Example’ links in this screen shot are the normal / listed posts to which we linked:

The action of us linking to these Listed topics, from our Unlisted topic, has then sent a notification to each of the people that created those topics. And possibly also to people who are tracking those same topics I assume (we didn’t test that part too).

So the authors of those five topics to which we linked in our Unlisted topic were all notified of our shiny new Unlisted topic by the site and also by email (depending on their preferences)

This issue is very similar to Unlisted topics become listed via references and it’s as if the topic-reflection issue was fixed in that issue but not the notification / email side of things - which is then letting the proverbial cat out of the bag.