[wp-hackers] Creating an "Author Cafe"

[William Canino]

In my multi-author blog, I have a couple of editor accounts plus a
dozen author accounts and growing.

To protect the anonymity of everyone, the blog's policy is that only
editors above will ever get to see anybody's email address.  To do
this, I redefined wp_notify_postauthor(), and I restricted access to
edit-comments.php with an init hook.

The pain right now is that the authors could not discuss privately or
coordinate amongst each other.  Obviously I can't start a YahooGroups
or something for this.

I'm thinking of creating one post, comments enabled, say post_id =
100, that is visible only to authors and editors.  This post mustn't
appear in feeds or to non-authors, and its comments mustn't appear in
the comments feed.

All the plugins I've seen that offer to do this seem to use a WP_Query
filter callback. It seems a big waste for the blog to scan each and
every query post array and take out this one post for 99% of the
world.  Is there a better way?  Do you have a better suggestion?

Best regards,
W