If you want to run competitions, hackathons, challenges around sensitive topics, or simply give users a space to submit ideas without having to immediately share them with all users, private idea submission can help you with that.

Using the "idea visibility" option on challenges, phases and milestones, you can set ideas to only be visible to challenge moderators.

Here's a detailed description of each option.

When this option is selected, ideas are visible according to the permissions on the challenge. Users with access to the challenge or phase will be able to see them. Users without access will not be able to view any ideas. This is the default settings.

When this option is selected, the only ideas visible to users are their own. No one else's ideas will be visible. Moderators will be able to view all the ideas, and perform moderator actions on them as normal.

Since this option can be set on any phase, it's possible for ideas to become invisible to users, or become visible to users as the ideas move through the phases. It's very important to exercise caution around how to handle ideas in these situations. While users may be submitting to a moderator-view phase, if later phases have "visible to anyone with access to the challenge" selected, it's best to inform users that this will happen. This can be done via the challenge description text.

Additionally, care should be taken when moving ideas from challenge with visibility set to moderators only into a challenge with full visibility, to ensure the idea is suitable for the new audience, and that the idea author is happy with this.

Ideas in moderator-view phases do not generate email notifications to non-moderators. So even if a user has subscribed to another user or one of their ideas, they will not be notified of activity happening in moderator-view phases or challenges.