Yikes, @mattdm’s suggestion would be a nightmare scenario for my Discourse forum. I have about 1.7M PMs, and many users very frequently refer back to their old PMs, they highly value that data and very much view it as permanent. Additionally, PMs are often used for detailed and carefully composed responses about important issues, and that paradigm is not aligned with the quick and frivolous nature of chats. I haven’t even enabled chats on my forum and I don’t plan to do so. It would quite simply be the end of my forum if Discourse tried to replace PMs with ephemeral chats. Please don’t go that route.
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