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Gather does not filter out mentions that are in different user's segments applied to topics. Is this expected behavior?
Posted Apr 23, 2021
When utilizing the User Segment's feature to allow only certain users access to certain topics, I expect that the mentions feature to also apply filtering on the Zendesk Backend so that only individuals who would be able to access the given forum via user segment would be able to only mention people that the resulting authorization would allow based on:
- user segment
- admin role
The screenshot below does not provide an extensive amount of context due to privacy, but this is demonstrating that everyone in our entire community (anyone who has access to any topic) can mention anyone else, which is concerning and has prevented me from turning on profiles (for reference, I've selected private profiles and it makes no difference).
Is this expected behavior?
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3 comments
Kasper Sørensen
Hi Mike,
I think this is a good piece of feedback and we could certainly improve the suggestions here to only show users that would actually be able to see the mention. On the other side, you could make an argument that a mention of someone is still useful even in a private conversation that they cannot access. For example if you have a closed topic and you want to tell someone to check out someone else's user profile or something like that.
In what way do you find it "concerning"? As far as I can tell there is no privacy or leak issue here. The only issue I see is that our mention-suggestions are maybe ineffective at finding the people involved in the current conversation - especially if it's a large community.
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Mike Khirallah
Hi Kasper,
Thank you for your response and your example use-case that counters my use-case. The reason I used the word concerned was specifically because I could not tell if this was the intended behavior, and since Zendesk User Segments are the only means of configuring authorization for end users, it was wrongly assumed that those segments would encompass both Gather topics and @mentions to users who have access to specific topics.
Based on your response, it was clearly intended behavior to be able to mention other users across topics and therefore, user segments. Just to provide more context as to why it is a PII issue for my use-case, people in different user segments should not know that other people (or other topics for that matter) even exist - each topic is designated to a single set of users. So when I was testing the new @mentions feature after turning on the profiles feature, I did not expect to be able to see users that were not in the given User Segment to show up.
Thank you again for your confirmation that this is intended behavior and the simple solution for our team is to keep the profiles feature disabled in order to prevent cross-topic mentions.
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Kasper Sørensen
Hey Mike Khirallah just one more thought from my side ... You could potentially achieve what you want with multiple Help Centers (requires multiple brands). The mentionable users are scoped per brand and you can only mention the users who have been active in the Help Center on that brand. You could effectuate the separation by setting up each Help Center to be restricted to only one user segment.
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