Question Posts in private / restricted boards visible to general public through User Activity and Recent Post

The explanation is clear, but something is puzzling to me. The kind of security *is* present in Kunena already, in a different part.

I have a test account on my forum (named "Test") - it's a basic, registered user, with nothing other than Public / Registered access. If I log in as that user, and look at the profile for GJSchaller, I can see his recent posts - but the post on the Scholar's Guild sub-board is not listed. Therefore, there is something in Kunena that is able to determine Test should not be able to see the post, and does not display it.

I understand the concept of hiding the board, but the purpose of the Private Board category is to A) organize all of the private boards under it, as sub-boards, and to provide a public place that documents the rules for accessing them. Some of the boards are public knowledge, but the contents of them are not. The category "Private Boards" contains the posts that explain how and why access will be granted to them.

I can work around this for now, but this is not a matter of the layout of the boards - the information should not be displayed. I can show examples on other forum software of how this layout works (SMF, which we migrated from, onto Kunena).

I've temporarily worked around this by not having any sub-boards that are private, but I would still like the Devs to look into this - if private messages can be hidden on a User's Profile, they should be able to be hidden on the Category Listing, too.

Thank you for your help!

Although you're still using terminology that will probably mystify some users who are new to Kunena (we prefer to use the term sub-category where you use the term sub-board) the issue is clear to me.

Yes, you can work around the issue by not having private categories or private sub-categories (if that's what you want to do) but you can resolve the problem by creating a section (call it "Private categories" if you like) with some publicly-viewable information (e.g. general information about what might be in that section) in a publicly-viewable category if you like. You can then place private categories into that section. If you have private categories in a section, the list of those categories will not even appear on the forum and, by extension, those who are not entitled to see in those categories will be unaware that (a) those categories exist - because the categories won't be listed - and (b) people will not be aware of any topics in those categories. That's what I was trying to explain in the last part of my early reply to you.

For example, use the Kunena Category Manager to set things up like this:

Private Categories (as a section) with access to everyone
.../General Information (as a category) with access to everyone
.../Scholar's Guild (as a category) with restricted access

This would work. Does this explanation make things clearer?

I did what you are suggesting as a work-around, but we have a LOT of private boards - now, the index has 31 boards on it for Admins, and other people who can see them all!

Ideally, I'd like to have it work something like this:

In-Game Boards (Parent Category, Public)
==Private Boards (Category, Public - contains public posts for everyone)
====Scholar's Guild (Sub-Category, Private by way of User Groups)
====(Lots of other sub-categories, each with a different User Group)

This would let me organize all of the sub-categories, so that they do not take up a lot of real estate on the screen. But until the issue of posts in private sub-categories showing to public users is fixed, this cannot be done.

I understand the situation. Indeed, there isn't a lot we can do when people have private sub-categories and, at the same time, remove the evidence of topics being posted in them (even if people can't view the contents of the actual messages, themselves) appearing on the Recent Topics view. This is a limitation in the current version of Kunena. I agree with you that it's something the Kunena development team should take an interest in. However, for the time being, the only relief I can suggest is to go about setting up your sections and categories in the way that I suggested.

You should not be surprised to know that we have several private categories here at this forum, too, but you don't see the categories listed anywhere. It's a bit tricky to explain in detail in a discussion like the one we've been having in this topic, but the way we've approached the issue is as I've outlined in my earlier replies to you.

In short, the appearance of messages posted into restricted sub-categories can't be resolved unless you make those sub-categories into categories. I agree with you that you would like to minimise the amount of screen real-estate but it really comes down to a question of privacy and what measures you're prepared to invest in obtaining the relevant degree of privacy on your forum.

I noticed that private posts are also hidden in the Recent Topics listing, as well as a user's profile - this means it's possible to hide them, and the code is already implemented in other parts of the Kunena component. It just needs to be applied to the "Last Post" portion of the Index.