Is there a combination of permissions that would let users only see forum topics they start? When I give the permission “Can view only own posts and admin/mod posts”, they can still see the TITLES of posts others start, and they can even see the admin responses, they just can’t see the contents of the posts others make.
What I want is the ability to have a private feedback forum where people can go in and start threads, and I can respond to them, and no one can see anyone else’s posts.
There is really not a way to do that right now. It has been discussed but hasn’t gained a lot of traction. In most cases people are just using Private messaging for that.
how hard would it be to add custom functionality to make the existing option “Can view only own posts and admin/mod posts” work that way? Any examples of vaguely similar modifications to point me to?
I have not seen anyone, including myself and I have done hundreds of custom themes, that have made a similar modification.
I would suggest you look into having a custom plug in created. Here’s a link to info on that. https://simple-press.com/custom-simplepress-plugin-development-services/
I think you could almost achieve this with filters but it would need several of them and some nifty SQL clauses…
Though it would be inefficient – could you not just jump into the loop where the topics are shown and just throw an if statement around the display logic?
Yellow Swordfish said
I think you could almost achieve this with filters but it would need several of them and some nifty SQL clauses…
Can you point me in the right direction for one of the filters and I’ll see what I can put together.
ok – last question for now 
What is the intended use for the option “Can view only own posts and admin/mod posts”? What I’m requesting is what I expected, I’m just wondering why the option exists in it’s current form. Perhaps I can re-structure the problem in my head!
#6: That would give you some nasty display issues. Like pages with nothing to show if no topics matched your criteria.
#8: Many permissions started life due to user request and I believe this may have been one of them. To be fair, as far as I am aware it does do what it says – surely it just doesn’t do it in a way you expected or prefer?
#7: Let’s take an example. In the /forum/content/classes folder you will find the files that control the different forum views and that populate the data objects used to display these views. Take the file sp-topic-view-class.php. This, as it’s name suggests, is used to populate the data in the fiorum’s topic view – the list of topic for a specific forum.
Around line 250 you will find the main SQL query being constructed that is going to get the topics needed for the page. This uses our own database query class. Just before the select is invoked you will see the filter ‘sph_topicview_query’ defined which is available for any user or plugin to manipulate the query as they wish. In this case such a filter could modify, replace or add to the query WHERE clause for example so that only topics whose first post was made by the current user were returned.
Note- however – that this would only satisfy the one view. Each view would require it’s own crafting.
Actually I just remembered that we DO have a ticket open to allow for truly private topics which is exactly what you want. I believe Steve had some ideas on how best to implement this so I will ask him when he gets back from vacation over the weekend.