The original poster, orangeandblack5, wants to know how to make personal messages (PMs) display as normal topics, not bubbles, as this feature is more useful to their user base for formatting long posts. Unfortunately, there is no toggleable setting for this feature.
Heliosurge couldn’t find a setting to revert this, and pfaffman suggested reverse engineering a theme component to undo the change.
orangeandblack5 found a possible solution using CSS code from another topic, which can be used to create a theme component. j127 provided a way to make this CSS code toggleable by creating a theme component using the theme CLI and shared a GitHub repository with the CSS code.
awesomerobot confirmed that using CSS in a component is the best way to undo the PM bubble feature and provided links to the relevant CSS files for further customization.
Hi, sorry if this exists already but searching for “bubbles” didn’t find anybody trying to figure out how to disable them.
A lot of our users use PM chains to format long posts they’re working on, and the ability to treat a PM as a WYSIWYG editor is much more useful to our userbase than the ability to have a slightly easier time determining when you’re looking at a PM vs a normal thread. Presumably there’s some setting somewhere that would allow us to simply have PMs display as normal threads - what would be the easiest way to get that set up?
There were several theme components that made these bubbles before it got moved to core, so you should be able to find one of those and use it as an example to undo it.
Which is cool if it works, I’m not our admin and literally just woke up so can’t yet confirm whether or not that’ll do the trick.
But I guess I’d like to update my post from a support request asking how to do this to a feature request asking to make it a simple toggleable setting. The fact it isn’t already that honestly seems like an oversight, but doesn’t seem like it’d be too difficult to add?
Bonus points if the site simply toggles the global default and users can then enable or disable it as they see fit.
If you put that CSS code into a theme component, it would be almost like a toggle. It’s easy to create a theme component with the theme CLI.
I just tried it and it seems to work. If you want, you can fork this repo (it contains the CSS from the other topic), edit the CSS how you want, paste the Github URL into the theme components section, and then it will be toggable with a button.
Yeah undoing it with CSS in a component is currently the best way, the above linked CSS seems like a good place to start… and if there’s something missing there all the PM bubble styles are contained here: