The Kunena team has announce the arrival of Kunena 7.0.5 [K 7.0.5] in stable which is now available for download as a native Joomla extension for J! 5.4.x/6.0.x. This version addresses most of the issues that were discovered in K 6.2 / K 6.3 / K 6.4 and issues discovered during the last development stages of K 7.0.
The Kunena team is also pleased to announce the eleventh version of Kunena 6.4, a native Joomla extension for Joomla! 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and 6.0.
Topics that are moved into this category are generally considered to be closed. Users may want to add additional information but these topics should not be resurrected in order to discuss new problems or unrelated matters.
Can Kunena and/or Discuss be configured so that some or all Joomla articles can be commented on within the article without initiating a topic in Kunena and without posting the comment to a Kunena forum?
Or, if that can't be done, so that the topic that stores the comment from the article is not accessible to the public, registered or not.
Answer is yes, Kunena Discuss always creates a new topic (though, there's a way to pick existing one). There are two options: create topic when article gets visited first time or to create topic on first answer.
Comment gets always posted to the forum, but there are ways to hide the forum from users (just hide parent category). It hides the messages from category listing, but they still show up in Recent topics and you can access them from the forum, if you know where to go.
You can also change a few other options to do various different things.
Discuss should also obey the rules in category: if user has rights to see the topic and if he can answer it.
Kunena does it like this because of it inherited the feature from older project, which we forked (FireBoard).
Kunena 2.0 works in a bit different way, but actually it reveals parent category if user has access to child of it. It just doesn't show any posts in the parent category, if the user doesn't have rights to see those.
I'm actually planning on doing hidden categories / custom ACL in K2.0, which will allow you to use Kunena as commenting engine while not showing the topic in Kunena itself.
Kunena is a superb tool for my purposes. I will use 1.6.x until 2.0 is available, then make use of the new features you mention. I am happy to hear of greater ACL functionality.
My reply doesn't automatically mean that we have really implemented the feature you need -- just that it shouldn't be too hard because of the changes I've made this far. There are a lot of ideas, but not enough time to make all of them happen in the next release.
