User visibility and private categories

I’ve a private mailing list that I might replace with a private Discourse category. On the mailing list, nobody but members can see the list of members. Is there any way of replicating that on Discourse? So that only members of a group can see members of that same group in lists of users. Alternatively, is it possible to hide all users (until they post messages of course)?

Update: The closest I have found is to:

  • Set enable user directory to false.
  • Answer “Who can see this group’s members?” with “Group owners, members and moderators”

It doesn’t seem possible to keep the user directory and at the same time only allow users to see “everybody except members of group X”.

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If I understand you correctly, you want some users to stay hidden everywhere on the site, while others are visible as normal yeah?

Have you tried hiding the user profiles? I believe you’d have to do this individually though.

Asides that I do not think I have seen a way to do this, I might be wrong.

Yes, that’s what I would like.

It would probably be possible to hide user profiles for “all members of group X” using Data Explorer - do you think?

Alternatively, maybe I could edit the Discouse mbox importer to do that when it imports the emails/users.

No I’m afraid, Data Explorer only has access to a read-only version of the database and cannot make changes to it.

That could be possible I guess, I cannot say for certain though.