Way to make part of the post visible to author and staff only?

Feature
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I’m my forums exclusievly for roleplaying purposes.
We have our character sheets partially hidden from other players’ eyes, so there’s always a surprise when it comes to characters’ abilities, which imposes safer, more realistic gameplay.
On an old phpBB 3.2 we used [HIDE] BBCode, which allowed to hide part of the post so it was visible only for staff members and author of the post.
Does Discourse allow it in any way, possibly via plugins?

If it’s impossible then maybe you could tell me how to hide a whole post like this?

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maybe you want the spoiler plugin?

Oh, but you want people not to be able to see it at all. A theme component could do it, but clever people could still look at the json or raw for the post. I think you’d need a plugin.

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A different suggestion is to PM staff with your character sheet, if the goal is to share the character sheets only with staff. You could also link to the PM in the topic so it is easy to get to. Only staff would be able to open that PM of course.

That is nearly identical to what you described except not inline content.

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I guess I’ll have to go with it – although it’s not very intuitive for an user do do that.

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It’s kind of an unusual scenario, to have a topic that has shared secrets with staff but not other posters.

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You could possibly use the Staff Notes Plugin. You would send a Staff member the character sheets and they would “load” them for each relevant user, and then see a clickable notes icon on each post so that the character info is easily at hand.

The author themself wouldn’t be able to see this, but presumably they already know this info anyway.

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The user needs to be able to edit this content, so unfortunately that’s not an option in this case.

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This still doesn’t seem to exist so I’ll convert it into a feature topic. :+1:

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The Discourse Private Replies plugin might do the job.

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Thank you. It’s almost what I need, but there is an important feature missing. I require the ability to hide certain parts of a post so that they can only be viewed by the post author and the staff members, not by the person who started the topic. In my scenario, that could lead to exploits.

In my head, it could work like this:

Part of the post available to the public
[hide]Part of the post that’s only viewable by the post author and the staff members[/hide]

Of course, I’d rather have something more modern than the [hide] BBCode.
It’s essential that the publicly available part of the post remains searchable.

PS: And yes, I still didn’t start my RPG-oriented Discourse forum because of this issue.

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If self hosted or have high enough tier. The Signatures Plugin could be used as @codinghorror mentioned by having the pm link in the user signature. Alternative link to a Private topics category link can work as well as @RGJ mentions.

Then no need to remember to add link to each post.