Should support private questions/answers

[Martin Pool]

In some cases users need share private sensitive or security-related information with developers. One specific interesting case would be if Answers are used as a medium for commercial support.

It would be useful if Answers could be marked private to facilitate this, as can be done with bugs.

The UI will need some care about how the privacy bit is turned on and off. Some users may mark their question "private" even if it doesn't really need to be so.

As a workaround the private data can be put in a bug linked from the question.

[Tony Yarusso (tonyyarusso)]

For our use case we'd like to make a project/section/distribution/whatever restricted, but not exactly private. The scenario is a customers-only support area, where only members of a closed group (the customers and staff) can post, as a way of prioritizing those people. Normally though customers would be able to read other customers' posts, although being able to actually make a thread private would also occasionally be handy. The bigger issue right at the moment though is having some kind of customers-only Answers area. (Bug #563092, the duplicate, was my original report for reference.)