Chat threads for DMs

Feature
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9

Hi Nathan and Lindsey,

Thanks for your replies. It feels great to participate in this community. :slight_smile:

I appreciate it that personal messages are available. However our users have something in common: My users love simple! :wink: But for some people, personal messages are easy, and for others chat dm’s are easy…

Obviously people who are using Discourse for years are really used to personal messages. They don’t have to think how to use it, because they already know it.

If I wanted to move the heaviest users of Discourse personal messages from Discourse to Slack, it would be easier to move them if Slack provided a graphic user interface that looked like the interface of Discourse.

If I wanted to move users from Slack to Discourse, it would be easier to move them if Discourse provided a graphic user interface that looks like the interface of Slack for direct messages.

It would also help if system messages and other messages like badge notifications could be delivered inside Discourse dm’s / direct messages instead of personal messages.

Because change can be hard for my team. Some don’t want to move to another platform. They are using Slack for years and want to keep using it.

If we’re moving from Slack to Discourse right now, everything would be different.

  • public and private Slack channels would be converted into public and private Discourse categories. Some of our users feel this as a big difference.
  • I don’t know if we would convert Slack DMs – right now there’s not a good alternative inside Discourse in my opinion.

If we’re moving from Slack to Discourse and DM threading would be enabled, 50% would be different. Around 50% of the conversations in our Slack Workspace take place inside direct messages. If chat threads for DMs would be available we would do this:

  • public and private Slack channels would be converted into public and private Discourse categories. Some of our users feel this as a big difference.
  • all Slack DMs would be converted into Discourse Chat DMs. As this is a familiar interface, I expect that people can use it right away when they know how to use Slack direct messages.

I think the Discourse team did a great job with Introducing chat threads! We would like to use chat threads for DMs too. Enabling this would make the gap between Slack and Discourse smaller.

Is it possible to add chat threads for DM’s with a plugin? If that’s not possible – is it possible to hire a developer that can add this to the core of Discourse? Or is it better if we wait until the Discourse team implemented this into the core of Discourse?

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