Personal (Private) Books #5415

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OVERLORD · 2026-02-05T10:03:13+03:00

OVERLORD commented

2026-02-05 10:03:13 +03:00

Originally created by @rveachkc on GitHub (Aug 28, 2025).

Describe the feature you'd like

I would like the ability to mark Books "private" or "personal" where the expected behavior is that only the owner of the book will be able to see or view the contents.

If a book was marked as private, I would expect that the owner of the book should have the ability uncheck the private box or transfer ownership. Both of these operations should be locked behind some kind of user confirmation.

My use case is personal, shared with my spouse, and I feel like my needs would be met by a simple implementation. Others who use this in a work setting may benefit from a private + overrides, similar to how book permissions allow overrides today.

Describe the benefits this would bring to existing BookStack users

Personal privacy

As a home user, I would really prefer to consolidate a lot of my notes into one tool, and out of the many I've tried, I've been happiest by far. I share an instance with my wife and even in a high trust environment, sometimes we just don't want each other's personal content to cloud up the home page or search results.

Can the goal of this request already be achieved via other means?

The current permissions model does not seem to allow for hiding content from admins and may not be intuitive for novice users.

Have you searched for an existing open/closed issue?

I have searched for existing issues and none cover my fundamental request

How long have you been using BookStack?

Over 5 years

Additional context

While nothing is truly ever really hidden from a server admin, I think requiring the use of a command or database update to recover content would sufficient.

Originally created by @rveachkc on GitHub (Aug 28, 2025). ### Describe the feature you'd like I would like the ability to mark Books "private" or "personal" where the expected behavior is that only the owner of the book will be able to see or view the contents. If a book was marked as private, I would expect that the owner of the book should have the ability uncheck the private box or transfer ownership. Both of these operations should be locked behind some kind of user confirmation. My use case is personal, shared with my spouse, and I feel like my needs would be met by a simple implementation. Others who use this in a work setting may benefit from a private + overrides, similar to how book permissions allow overrides today. ### Describe the benefits this would bring to existing BookStack users Personal privacy As a home user, I would really prefer to consolidate a lot of my notes into one tool, and out of the many I've tried, I've been happiest by far. I share an instance with my wife and even in a high trust environment, sometimes we just don't want each other's personal content to cloud up the home page or search results. ### Can the goal of this request already be achieved via other means? The current permissions model does not seem to allow for hiding content from admins and may not be intuitive for novice users. ### Have you searched for an existing open/closed issue? - [x] I have searched for existing issues and none cover my fundamental request ### How long have you been using BookStack? Over 5 years ### Additional context While nothing is truly ever *really* hidden from a server admin, I think requiring the use of a command or database update to recover content would sufficient.

OVERLORD added the 🔨 Feature Request label 2026-02-05 10:03:13 +03:00

OVERLORD commented

2026-02-05 10:03:14 +03:00

@ssddanbrown commented on GitHub (Aug 29, 2025):

Thanks for the input @rveachkc.
Some related prior discussion in #747, with #1747 also being somewhat related.

To be honest, I'm not keen on having to consider view control for admin-level users.
Adding that expectation of permission control adds complication & considerations to those areas for what I think is little ultimate audience benefit.

You could somewhat achieve this via users provided custom admin roles (not assigned to the default admin role), as view permission controls will be active in that case, so you can configure per-book overrides with single-user roles to create this effect, but they'd still be potentially visible in admin level areas (audit log, recycle bin etc...) and to users in the original system admin account.
This would avoid seeing eachothers content on the homepage and search as desired though.

@ssddanbrown commented on GitHub (Aug 29, 2025): Thanks for the input @rveachkc. Some related prior discussion in #747, with #1747 also being somewhat related. To be honest, I'm not keen on having to consider view control for admin-level users. Adding that expectation of permission control adds complication & considerations to those areas for what I think is little ultimate audience benefit. You could somewhat achieve this via users provided custom admin roles (not assigned to the default admin role), as view permission controls will be active in that case, so you can configure per-book overrides with single-user roles to create this effect, but they'd still be potentially visible in admin level areas (audit log, recycle bin etc...) and to users in the original system admin account. This would avoid seeing eachothers content on the homepage and search as desired though.

OVERLORD referenced this issue

2026-02-05 10:33:46 +03:00

[PR #5415] [MERGED] Further Lexical Fixes #6494

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Reference: starred/BookStack#5415