Possible to have Private/Logged in members only viewable subforum?

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This will probably sound paranoid, but what with the amount of SEO spiders crawling every webpage and indexing everything, and with no current indication of who’s online, absolutely everything that’s posted goes straight out into the “everywhere”. Now I appreciate that just having a log in as a barrier isn’t a barrier to anything but spiders and the terminally lazy but…I kind of wanted to start a Post a Pic of your Pet thread. However, the idea of those pictures then being scooped up into Google Images bothers me (and my dog!) a little.

So would it be possible either to have a proper Hide option that restricts viewing to only those logged in, or a sub forum that’s only visible once you are logged in (and not a bot)?

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So I did a little digging on this, and unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to do this aside from a) locking the entire community behind a login requirement or b) disallowing web scraping from the community entirely. Neither of those options are something we want to do, so until the Discourse team adds some more granular privacy settings I’m afraid the bots will be bots. :frowning:

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Thanks for looking it to it. Totally understand that it’s not currently viable, but thought I’d ask just in case it was. Neither of those options is particularly great for you… :frowning:

Thank you anyway.

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