Can I separate visibility and editing in moderator/custom role permissions?

I don’t have an easy answer for you and have recently faced similar challenges myself, adding this idea for future improvements: 

• Category-specific Content Moderation Role Open
• 5 Votes

However, based on your use case, I might have some recommendations that can work for you. 

If your support team uses Slack (or Teams and likely other platforms), there’s probably ways for you to set this up using the API (or a tool like Zapier).

But first, let me give you one specific recommendation: make them Super Users (if you find a way where they won’t need Moderator access or higher). The Super User role comes with the ability to mark best answers. If they don’t need access to the Control backend, Super User will solve that part of it. 

So how to give them the specific views outside of control? Either the New Topic Zapier trigger or a Webhook setup for new posts. That could then be funneled into a Slack/Teams channel, pulling in the post itself and linking back to the community for them to respond or mark an answer. 

This could be helpful for segmenting out only specific questions based on category, tag, or time since the post as well. I’ve outlined some of the complex stuff I’ve done here: 

• How to use Webhooks and Zapier (or another API tool) to improve your reply rate

Would this all be easier if you could set up moderation how you describe in control? Yes. :) 

Where I think my suggestion breaks down: 

• I don’t see a way for the team to add or see Team notes via the API, so you couldn’t even push those notes back to Insided from Slack
  • That said: who needs to see the Team Notes? If it’s just that support team, they could make the notes in the thread/channel themselves. (For example, I believe the Insided team does/did this for Ideas that come in… They go into Slack, the team discusses the idea in the thread, coordinates the response, adds to their product management workflows and proceses, etc)
• Easy access to read email addresses
  • This is possible to pull through with some more API calls in a Zapier automation or pulling from Salesforce (if you use that), but it adds even more complexity. 

Not sure if this helps. If you want to chat more about this, shoot me a message. 

Thank you @DannyPancratz, very interesting. The team notes are for linking discussion to other tools - for example, if a user asks for support in such a way that needs a ticket to be created internally, the team will do that in JIRA. Then we’ve agreed that they post the link to the community thread in the JIRA ticket, and the link to the JIRA ticket in the team notes. That way, whichever one the team is viewing, they can update the other.

I do plan to work with our development teams to build something directly with the API to tailor it to exactly what’s needed, but it’ll be a while until they can do, so this is very much me trying to find the right stopgap. Unfortunately I don’t think your idea has much overlap with mine, but I can see it does mean you’re running up against some of the same blockers!

Makes sense. All the best to finding a solution.