I’d like to propose adding a private section to the Developer Community Forum that is accessible only to approved Theme Store partners and Shopify staff.
When the partner Slack workspace was active, there was a dedicated space where partners could discuss technical issues, share sensitive implementation details, and collaborate with Shopify teams without exposing information publicly. Now that Slack has been retired and the forums are the primary channel for reporting issues and providing product feedback, there’s no equivalent private area for these conversations.
I don’t feel comfortable sharing certain things publicly, and our issues usually aren’t for everyone else to see. Keeping things private, the way we did in Slack, is the best approach in my view.
A partner-only section would allow theme partners to raise platform or tooling issues that can’t be discussed openly, while still keeping everything within the officially supported forum. This would preserve the privacy and security requirements many partners have, and restore a communication channel that previously existed.
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Discretion was one slacks many strengths , beyond being a MASSIVE repository of expert knowledge.
Lot of merchants, or public in general, can’t deal with how the sausage is made and shouldn’t even be exposed to even thinking bout it.
That while the slack shouldn’t have been so hard to access for all the knowledge it shouldn’t just get nuked either.
But hey guess shopify got the training data they wanted out of us and it’s time to pull up this ladder among others.
Or the smattering of other reasons like increasing partners count with probably lower returns from inability to moderate. Or the PR problem of many many many partner complaints having a central area to consolidate in the face of so many tone deaf changes everyone should expect from a publicly traded company.
But that’s the problem with all these walled gardens setting up toll roads on other peoples/platforms content, they eventually turn into sinkholes 
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I wouldn’t count on a private area on the forum, even if there is one.
The last time there was a private partner area on the community forums it was barely used because most weren’t told about it even less so than the partners slack RIP 
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Or if a private area what will the actual utility be?
Do you think you could really EVER trust put anything the least bit sensitive in it.
On the merchant forums when they transferred forum software they just dumped the “private” partner area into a public forum anyway.
You can’t trust the platform to not fumble communications handling as that has been the historical norm.
The partner slack being sunsetting in totality is just more evidence to guarantee future fumbling.
50k+ partners in almost a decade of communications sharing knowledge… just gone.
Newbies to the platform are gonna be fully cooked, unable to get deep context unless it’s from “AI”, lul.
And incumbent partners , are fully in the slow boiler now 
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Ever "established, “entrenched” partner is gonna get phased out too as roadbumps along the road towards shopify arriving at the destination of treating merchants as middlemen who need to be ditched because merchants are also in the way between shopify and money.