Private posts for specific users

[decentral1se]

Sorry still not finding time to hack again on stuff, but here's another report!

This is probably a can of worms but a real thing that we are running into with PMC discussions and testing. We have some pretty spicy internal organising convos and these should not be shared. Meanwhile, Cerca is meant to be a simple entrypoint for the general public.

So, we have a situation where we would like to have a general public sign up to the forum and post and so on. Then we want to have private discussions with a specific group of signed up users. The threads of these users should be hidden from the other users.

Related: https://github.com/cblgh/cerca/issues/70

[cblgh]

hey no worries, been in a similar situ recently (but! i've also clarified next tasks on a bunch of cerca features! :])

SOOOO this is a big freakin can of worms :] i really want to avoid the tiered user problem of forums of yore, where all users are equal but admins are more equal (=> access to secret forums / secret sections).

i am going to punt on this and for the moment emphasize using other channels for these secret admin discussions (which will also act as a backup channel for youse if the forum goes down somehow?). totally a punt though.

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i understand what you're asking for, i am uncertain of catering for it. one pov: if you can't trust your membership to respect the e.g. users-only "admins thread - read but don't chime in thanks" i think that's a smell? this kind of division is also a potent source of toxic social dynamics, based on past experience.

cerca's current model is to be default public for the world with regard to taking part of posts with additional benefits accruing to its members such as posting and reading private threads. then finally trying to only laden on necessary burdens for admins and no additional privileges.

[cblgh]

imo: let's circle back to this topic after the other relevant features you've raised are implemented? i'll be busy this coming week but might have some fortuitous time to hack on things next week 🤞

[decentral1se]

the pmc crew do have other channels for private discussions but they can't easily be followed by all due to excessive message backlog. these aren't forum admin discussions, it's about broader pmc orga work.

it's no so much that we're saddling admins with additional powers in our scenario. we have non-admin users who are involved in pmc wiki (and other stuff) internal organising and some of their discussions should not be public and require long-form forum format.

so yes, we have some desire for "normal users", "pmc internal users" and then "admins" exist anyway. pmc internal user private threads would not be visible by "normal users". so it's more a question of a separate user group vs. an admin group specifically tasked with forum administration.

we'd like to merge our 1. public entrypoint 2. internal organising in a single tool. we seem to be running up against the current design of cerca, which is of course, fine!

testing/discussion ongoing, thanks for weighing in!

[cblgh]

of course!

the distinction between tiered users (not admins) and tiered users (admins) doesn't matter as much from my current pov, it is the tiering direction itself i don't want to trial in upstream. that said, i am happy to help y'all add the functionality yerselves tho!

this is why i was emphasizing that we first land the other raised features, so that we can then look towards adding features to your pmc install. if this is clearly a deal breaker for pmc's adoption of cerca, do please let me know ahead of time 🙏

[decentral1se]

Sounds good! The vibe is very much still for using cerca. I will try to loop back then on the backlog of other stuff when I can and we see where we end up with this later ✌️