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Hi, I'm looking for some high-level design guidance as to how best to accomplish this.
I would like to configure a forum with permissions that will permit any site visitor, logged in or not, to submit a confidential report. It is important that other users who do not have sufficient permissions will not be able to see reports submitted by others. Users should be able to see their own forum submission and should be able to see and add to replies. (Administrator or other privileged users may add replies to the user's original topic.) Toward this end, I created a "Confidential" permission set. If I enable under Edit Permission >> Viewing only the "Can view own posts and admin/mod posts" would that have the desired effect, or would that allow anyone, not just the original topic submitter, to see all admin/mod replies in response to ANY topic? I need to compartmentalize access so that only the initial topic submitter and any authorized admin/mod are able to see any aspect of the topic thread, including its existence, content, and authors.
I need to simplify the user interface as much as possible for at least the initial submission. The standard forum interface, while fine for typical forum users, would be potentially overwhelming for visitors who are not all that comfortable with computers in the first place. I also want to facilitate report submissions via mobile device, so having less on the screen becomes more important than having all the usual forum capabilities available. I was thinking of using a front end form to create a custom post, then use the Blog Post Linking plugin to create the corresponding forum topic. Does this sound viable? I haven't used the Blog Post Linking plugin yet, so I'd appreciate any pointers.
Post by email may also have application here, as more people are familiar with how to send an email than with how to submit a forum post.
Thanks for any advice.
Brad
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I am not sure I fully understand what you want... if you select view own posts and admin posts permission, users will only be able to see their own posts and those of admin... you will also want to give them create topic and reply topic permissions... but they WILL be able to see any post from admins... regardless of what the admin post may have been in response too... so that may not be what you want... we do not have any topic base permissions which is sort of what you are looking for, I think... but I will open a ticket for consideration of a private topic concept... please correct me if I am misunderstanding...
without knowing too much details, having a form create a wp blog post which in turn creates a blog linked forum topic sounds feasible... you will just have to make sure the post creation from form fires the standard wp hooks for post creation... and you will be limited to a single default forum for all these linked topics unless you get exotic in the form creation and hook into the sp process for grabbing the forum to link it to info...
post by email would certainly work quite nicely here... might take users a couple of emails to get the format of the emails down if not technical to make sure it ends up in right place...
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Thanks, Steve. You clarified my understanding. It is a problem for my design intent that all admin posts would be visible regardless of what the admin post was in response to. It looks like for now I'll need to handle this functionality outside the forums.
If you're considering adding a "Confidential" concept in the future, perhaps this could be accomplished as a per-topic or per-post setting rather than solely a forum permissions setting. (I'm using "Confidential" to avoid confusion with the existing "Private" forum capability.)
As an example, my intended use is for crime reporting. Users providing confidential crime tips often want the assurance that other users won't be able to see the submitted crime reports. However, it would be useful to have one topic for a given crime, such that many individuals could independently provide information relating to that same crime topic but not be able to see the information submitted by others.
Another slightly different example would be a technical support forum in which an entire topic thread (rather than individual posts within the topic as in my intended use) is made confidential so that passwords or configuration settings are not revealed to other forum users.
Configuration choices might be Standard, Confidential, or User Specified. Configuration could be applied at the forum, topic, or individual post within forum level and would be inherited downward from forum to topic to reply. Anything "Confidential" would be visible only to the author and admin/mod.
Thanks for considering this.
Brad
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I actually like the use case for private topics... makes good sense... only between admins and user who created... not sure about the post by post use case though... would seem rather odd and ugly... and hard for any kind of conversation or discussion... and potentially fraught with problems 
ticket is open... we have a 5.2 coming up, but unknown if we can get it in there...
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Great, that's encouraging. 5.whenever beats the heck out of never.
On the issue of post-by-post confidentiality, I just realized that my initial premise of nested replies was incorrect. Nesting replies is not a configurable option, is it?
My thinking was that post-by-post confidentiality would simplify the admin experience by grouping related confidential submissions under one topic. For example, if police want to solicit tips on a particular crime, it would be easier to create a single specific topic for that crime and then direct users to that topic rather than try to classify and associate lots of individual topics. In effect, the topic thread would exist as it does now with potentially many users responding to the topic; however, a non-admin/mod user would not be able to see or respond to any posts by OR HIERARCHICALLY BELOW POSTS BY another non-admin/mod user. That last bit only makes sense if replies are nested; if not, it would indeed be odd and ugly and very hard to have any kind of conversation.
Without nested replies, the confidential topic could still be used by multiple users to submit reports unbeknownst to each other, but this would be a one-way communication to the admin/mod. To provide two-way communication between user and admin/mod, I guess I would need to create a separate topic for each user.
Food for thought. I'll be pleased to make use of whatever you come up with.
Have a great Thanksgiving.
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you too!
its still in the queue for 5.2, but only if time permits...
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