Hi there, appreciate the reply! No worries, I can just leave it disabled for now, or if needed I can temporarily fork it from the old version for now.
Have you considered trying to submit this as a PR to the upstream Discourse app to share the maintenance burden? It’s really quite a major limitation of Discourse that admins have to chose between allowing PMs for untrusted user groups (really bad idea, I had a major PM spam attack on a non-Discourse forum) or else not allow new users to contact staff. I’ve handled tons of (public) questions already in the short time since migrating to Discourse from new users that were trying to contact me and couldn’t.