Disable personal message between members

Product Support

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around disabling personal messages between regular users while allowing admins and staff to message them. Steve_John references a 2023 thread and asks if there have been updates. Heliosurge notes a plugin, Allow PM to Staff, for self-hosted instances. Moin explains that removing users from the personal message enabled group site setting prevents regular users from initiating messages, while admins and moderators remain unaffected. Staff can still message users. To allow users to message admins, the admin group can be configured to accept messages from everyone, and a message button can be added to the group page. Users can also manually create messages using the link {yourForum}/new-message or by using the ?groupname=admins parameter. Additionally, users can flag content to message staff. To improve visibility, Moin suggests placing a message link in the sidebar or using theme components for custom navigation links.

1

I noticed that there was a discussion on this topic back in 2023, but it didn’t seem to reach a clear conclusion, as noted by Jay:

How do I disable personal messages between members but not admin to members?

Has anything changed recently regarding this? Specifically, how can we disable private messaging between regular users while still allowing admins and staff to initiate messages?

2

If you are self hosted there is a plugin. Allow pm to staff.

3

You can remove users from the personal message enabled group site setting, and then staff can still message them. The setting is about who is allowed to initiate a message and you cannot remove admins and moderators from it.

If you want users to be able to initiate messages to admins, you can allow “everyone” to message your admin group in the group configuration. (You can also enable that for other groups like moderators and staff)

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Then the user will see a message button at the top of the group page

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They can also add a group manually to a new message, but since most parts of the interface related to messages are hidden, you may want to place a link that creates a new message somewhere where they can find it. I would add the link to the sidebar or use a theme component like Custom Header Links (icons) or Custom Top Navigation Links depending on how prominent you need it. The link to create a new message is {yourForum}/new-message. You can also add the groupname parameter to prefill the recipient ?groupname=admins
Users can also flag anything as “something else” to message staff.