I have something I’d like to add to this.
I recently sent a Moderator Warning PM to a user, who immediately went in and removed himself from the message. 
For warnings, shouldn’t this feature be turned off?
AI-generated summary
A discussion started by Slowhand about users being able to remove themselves from “Official Warning” PMs. Slowhand shared an instance where a user removed himself from a warning PM, despite it being marked as an “official warning.” jomaxro agrees that users should not be able to remove themselves from official warnings, as it defeats the purpose.
codinghorror questions whether it matters, as staff can add the user back to the warning PM if needed. However, Slowhand argues that in his case, it was important to know if the user was intentionally ignoring the warning or genuinely didn’t understand.
simon suggests that while it’s technically possible to prevent users from removing themselves from warnings, it’s not a high-priority issue. However, simon notes a minor UI issue where the warning count remains on the user’s profile, but the warning PM is no longer accessible. A possible solution is to use the UserWarning record to link to previous warnings instead of the user’s warnings inbox.
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I moved your reply to a separate topic. I agree users shouldn’t be able to remove themselves from an Official Warning PM, that pretty much defeats the purpose.
(That said, you do know they saw it 
)
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That’s true. I know he saw it, but really…
Here’s a screenshot of it. (and yes, I did tick the “official warning” box) 
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Sorry, I was saying I agree with you that users shouldn’t be able to remove themselves, not that they currently are unable to. Edited my above post.
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Right but does it matter? They clearly saw it, staff can add them back in any time if they need to, etc?
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In this case, yes, it mattered, I needed to know if he was doing something purposefully or if he really didn’t understand what he was doing wrong.
Turns out that even though I’d warned him several times, he hadn’t bothered to try to understand. Spent over an hour trying to teach him to use the “Edit” button. Still doesn’t understand.
(I know, TMI)
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Sorry for bumping an old topic. I was just looking into this issue. I agree that if a warned user removes themselves from the warning PM, that indicates that the user has seen the warning. It would probably be technically possible to prevent users from removing themselves from warning PMs, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue that comes up very often, so implementing that is probably not something that needs to be prioritized.
There is a minor UI issue when a user removes themselves from a warning though. The warning count is still displayed for staff on the user’s profile page, but clicking the warnings link takes you to /u/<username>/messages/warnings and displays the “You don’t have any messages” text:
The warning PM still exists, but it’s no longer in the user’s warnings inbox. The UserWarning record still exists in the database. That entry contains the user_id of the warned user and the topic_id of the warning PM. It seems that it would be possible to use those records to link to previous warnings that have been sent to the user instead of linking to /u/<username>/messages/warnings.
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