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?
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.
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.
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.