Forum Discussion

fergalwalsh's avatar
fergalwalsh
Contributor
3 months ago

Seeking Advice on Restricting Access to a posts to those who have the permalink.

Hi everyone,

I’m facing a challenge in Khoros and could use some advice.

I need to occasionally create specific posts and share permalinks via email with a customer base. However, we don’t want these posts to be accessible to random users browsing our community site. Most importantly, we do NOT want the root folder to be accessible, so that we can prevent users from accessing the repository of posts or easily gathering all the posts that we publish over time.

Any suggestions on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance.

Fergal



  • MattV's avatar
    MattV
    Khoros Staff
    3 months ago

    we do want the root folder to be accessible

    Was that meant to be "don't want"?

    Community isn't meant to gate-keep down to the message level. You can restrict who can see a board (or blog, or tkb) and (all) the messages in that board.

    As long as they have access to messages in a board, a user (or bot) could modify the URL by editing the ID segment to find other posts in that board. Alternatively, a clever user (or bot) could leverage the API to browse the posts in that board (if they have access).

    The best you could do, is create a custom board page quilt (or whatever the discussion style is), and remove the component that lists all the messages, so it becomes harder to just randomly browse the content.

    But ultimately, the community isn't really designed to do what you are trying to do.

  • fergalwalsh's avatar
    fergalwalsh
    Contributor
    3 months ago

    Hi MattV, indeed that was meant to say " do not want" - I corrected the typo in my OP.

    Thanks for the insight. I was under the impression that there was a private node feature that would provide such functionality.

    I will explore removing the component that lists all the messages.
    As far as I can tell these are the All Form Topics button as well as the Next Topic and Previous Topic buttons.

    I believe the only other way users can discover all posts is by inspecting the Admin users profile history. Do you know if I can block access to some admins profile history?





  • nethanpaul's avatar
    nethanpaul
    Contributor
    2 months ago

    To restrict access to certain posts in Khoros, you can create a private or hidden board and adjust its permissions so that only users with the direct permalink can access the posts. This ensures that the posts are not visible in navigation or search results, maintaining their privacy while allowing selective sharing.