Hi, I wonder what others thoughts are regarding turning off private messaging and chats. My forum will be using paid advertising on the front end of the website and also ads in the Discourse forum.
My concern is people will try to start selling their products by contacting users via private messages.
I wanted to know if you have private messaging turned off on your forums and if you received any complaints from users or users requesting it be turned on.
It is a brand new forum and the advertising will be my source of income. By the same token I donāt want to turn people off by having private messaging turned off. I wonder if they will be disinterested in the forum and just use Reddit instead because they have the freedom of private messages.
Another option to consider is to clearly lay out in your guidelines what is and isnāt allowed with regards to this behavior, and what the consequences are of not following those rules.
Community members can flag posts and messages that are in violation of your guidelines, so you could decide to suspend users who ignore them, for example, while allowing those playing by the rules to use those features.
I personally have them hidden on my forums and have it so that only I the admin can initiate a chat with people.
I donāt have many users so I dont know the impact of this. From my standpoint, itās a fear of me as admin having access to the raw data of the personal chats and not knowing how to deal with it legally if something were to happen.
Now that Discourse Encrypt is deprecated, I donāt know if I even want people to have the ability to send any private message in general.
I fear the legal responsibility of messages that people think are private but are not private to the admin, I almost want to link people to chat on Signal or Whatsapp.
I didnāt think of it from the legal side. That is a good point to consider. Maybe I will leave it off and just see if people ask for it. I donāt want to turn it on then it become an administrative nightmare and then get complaints because I turned it off.
Even if I put in the forum rules not to break rules inside private messages or chat people will still do it and I will have no way to monitor it.
Thanks for your suggestions. If I did have it on and had rules around use. How would I monitor to make sure people arenāt breaking the rules? Not everyone is going to flag them.
Is there some kind of bot with messages that could look for certain words?
Thatās great I will take a look. I did have watched words set but just assumed it would work on the forum only. I will setup some test users and have a play around.
Iām interested to hear more about your fear of legal ramifications. There is no legal difference (that Iām aware of ā but I am not a lawyer) between data in forum posts or data in PMs or chat messages ā you have the same responsibility to handle illegal content, regardless of what form it takes.
Yes, I think my assumption (which could be wrong) is that people tend to view private messages or chats like being a private room with someone and the forum as being in a public room where everyone can watch.
With that in mind, I worry that people may open up much more in the more private spaces than the more public spaces. And by open up, I mean more sensitive info, like personal or intimate details, or just whatever people talk about when they think no one else is listening.
But perhaps other admins have more real-world insight into whether this happens or is mostly just a fear of mine.
It may be a very legitimate fear, depending on your audience. The best way to get ahead of that if you donāt want to switch the systems off is to use watched words or AI triaging, and to have very clearly documented policies explaining that admins have access to all private messages and chats for moderation and safety reasons.
The illegal harm and how you deal with it is the same whether in a public post or a private one, but you are correct that you greatly reduce the risk of harm by closing private channels.
I wonder if a way to do this is to somehow tweak the interface so that the admin either appears to be in all private chats or actually is in all private chats.
This could make it more obvious that āhey, Iām watching.ā
Maybe overkill? Not sure. But may alleviate the fear that people will have creepy/illegal conversations there.
I think that really is a great idea. You can put a million legal statements on your site and people are still going to break the rules.
This would also be good for sites where the audience are children. It might discourage creepers and other kids bullying. I think there would be so many use cases for that.
I mean, I think the level of āweāre watching youā can be tweaked, from a subtle message to a big āBIG BROTHER SEES EVERYTHING YOU DOā smack in the face. But yes, perhaps the use case would vary.
On my forum, Iāve changed text to make them āDirect messagesā instead of āPrivate Messagesā.
Iāve also added a disclaimer in the ToS and another on the message editor page.
This is important because some users were flagging messages sent to them, requiring moderator action. The content of the flagged post is visible to moderators.
This flagging of messages is required to stop āabuse by messageā. Users were happy with it, so long as they are told itās a possibility.
Of course you should believe that the admin of any system you are using can monitor your activity. Even in end to end encrypted systems you are trusting the admin not to insert code that captures your keystrokes.
I will look at trying to do that with CSS my theme in a few days. 