I am running a forum game. The thread specifically states only players may post in the thread, but someone ignore that and posted anyway. Even worse, they made a statement about the future state of the game.
I would like to have a function where the thread starter can limit who is able to post on a thread. That will be very useful for forum games.
The forum software is Discourse. I don’t think that is currently possible with a public thread. However, we can manually delete such posts.
Deletion is not a solution. If the errant post gives away information, the cat is already out of the bag.
Yes, I agree. It’s not an ideal solution and only works if no one else has seen it yet.
Another possibility is to play the game within a private message thread, where each spectator would have to be added (after vetting that they won’t post).
For public visibility, it could be possible to mirror the game state in a thread that is locked between edits.
It’s impossible to guarantee that nobody has seen a post. Here are reasons:
I like having the games publicly readable, I think that adds to the community.
I’m not sure if that will work since the organizer still needs to read posts to approve them. And then, what if they are playing the game? I’m not in favor of a solution which prevents the organizer from playing in the game.
Yeah, of course. There are a lot shortcomings with my proposed workarounds.
It would be ideal to add this feature, but I think that would require modifying the forum source code, which is not maintained by OGS, and getting a successful pull request, or successfully requesting that the developers add this feature.
Maybe something is possible by creating groups, which are not really fully utilized here, but I’m not sure.
I posted a feature request on the discourse site:
Maybe the developers there will see this as a useful feature to add to the software.
To be fair: I personally think that your harsh response to that someone was more detrimental to the game than the “intruding” message itself.
To be pedantic: you were eliminated from the game and still posting messages to the thread, so it’s not really a surprise that another non-player felt ok posting messages to the thread too.
We can disagree on that.
Just because someone was eliminated does not mean they were no longer a player. Also, I did not state anything about the future state of the game.
Turning threads into private fiefdoms ruled by their creators is a level of fascistic censorship quite out of keeping with OGS tradition and practice. Comparable problems sometimes plague go games too, where people have spammed the chat of a major tournament or relayed illegal information to one of the players.
The remedy for such cases and for the one you describe is this: the disruption is reported, the mods investigate, and, if warranted the violator is warned (or banned if a troll). If a repetition pf the disruptive behavior occurs, the violator is banned.
If somebody wants to influence a forum game, they can also post comments about an ongoing game in other threads. Even if we had the proposed feature.
To be clear, I don’t believe that Glunkolin had the intention to influence the gameplay. More likely they were interested in the position, and posted without realising that it might be seen as an unwanted outside influence. And this is basically what the proposed feature would help to prevent.
It is already possible to make private threads. The difference is that the public doesn’t even have view-rights on private threads. I guess if you don’t even see the thread, you won’t get angry for not being able to post in it. 
There are also groups on OGS, where only members can write etc.
These may be different features, but the principle is the same; Limit the rights of users. Is either of these features fascist censorship to you?
I don’t believe that applies here. There was clearly no violation of the site rules.
Given the following thread, I don’t think this will get much traction at Discourse:
And actually the more I think about it, the more I think this request goes against the spirit of a forum generally, although I totally get where the request is coming from since we’ve “hacked” gameplay into the forums 
Here was a reply in that thread from a co-founder:
No, it would require almost a complete rewrite of Discourse from the ground up. We don’t do, and have never done, per topic permissions. Other than PMs.
You can of course convert topics to PMs and vice versa.
Seems as good a note to close discussion on this as any.