Elgg 1.8 (and 0.x, funnily enough) has the useful facility to show the permissions of posts but, for some reason, most of those of us on 1.7 don't seem to get that.

It's a vital feature as otherwise, because comments inherit permissions from their posts, posters of comments may reveal more (or less) than they intend. It's an issue of personal control over information. It's a particular issue when posts are public - some of our users assume that discussions are only going to be visible internally and get rightly upset when they find their comments are available via a Google search.

This plugin simply adds a line of text near the submit button when posting a comment to show who will get to see it, with some custom phrases for cases where the access rights are not visible (e.g. for a personal collection) and a more prominent warning when access rights are public. It's especially handy for me when looking at student work to see how private or public they have made it, so (for instance) I can tailor my responses to the individual, the group or the world depending on the access rights.

Note that it only handles comments on posts on standard entities like blogs, bookmarks, files, pages, etc, and it doesn't handle discussion posts - that's still to be done.

Just an interim solution - should be redundant once we move to 1.8.

Produced for and with the support of Athabasca University