The discussion revolves around hiding user visibility and implementing private categories on Discourse. Jonathan5 wants to replicate a private mailing list where only members can see each other’s names. He has partially achieved this by disabling the user directory and limiting group member visibility to owners, members, and moderators. However, he cannot hide specific groups from the user directory.
osioke suggests hiding user profiles individually, but notes that this might not be feasible for large groups. Jonathan5 proposes using Data Explorer to hide user profiles for a specific group, but osioke points out that Data Explorer is read-only and cannot make changes to the database. An alternative solution might be editing the Discourse mbox importer to hide user profiles during import.
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”.