Hello! I run a self-hosted ghost site where we are interested in giving writers permission to publish their own articles. However, we only want to send high-quality content to our email subscribers – so we want only staff with “Editor” level or higher to be able to send emails.
This is an issue that is an important problem to solve for us, but I would prefer to not maintain a fork. So I’m wondering if this is something that the community would consider merging upstream if I contributed it? If so, do you have ideas about the best way to do it?
There are two main ways I could see this happening:
Add a new staff level (“Writer”?) below “Author” that only has permission to publish posts but NOT send email
Add a config option to determine if Authors should be able to send emails or not
Is this something people would be interested in? Any guidance on where to get started or preferences on which direction to go? I’m leaning towards #2 as I think it’s the simplest, probably.
In case anyone else also wants this, we have a fork of Ghost with this feature implemented via this PR. We removed the ability to authors to send emails, and then prevented them from being able to see select those buttons in the post publisher:
A config option to allow/disallow the Author role from sending newsletter emails is something we really, really need as well. Many companies have far more onerous legal/signoff requirements for bulk emails than for online posts, simply because the damage that can be done with bulk mail is much greater.
Posts can be edited or deleted if problems are later found; bulk emails can’t be.
Poorly constructed emails could trigger spam filters, damaging site reputation and causing future delivery problems.
Different newsletters are meant to be sent at different frequencies, and allowing authors unfettered access to send emails at higher rates may violate those policies.
It’s therefore important that actual ‘newsletter’ content only goes out if it has Editor-level approvals. It may be fine for 20-30 company authors to post on a Ghost-powered, forum-styled site and make a few mistakes. It’s a much bigger deal to trust all of them with the ability to blast bulk emails across entire mailing lists.
We don’t really want to jump off Ghost.pro to a custom hosting solution, so I’ve been looking for some tolerable workaround (making the Authors ‘Contributors’ is a worse option, because they all need to be able to post semi-immediately.) So far the only approach appears to be to disable Ghost newsletters entirely, then use a 3rd party newsletter service.
But a Ghost setting that would restrict publish-as-email to Editor or Admin roles would solve it all immediately. It’d also better open up Ghost.pro as an option for forum-styled sites as well as the current newsletter and/or blog styles.