Thanks for the explanation. I hadn’t heard of the Digital Services Act.
I’m confused about the law. Gmail is a website; my forum is a website. Why would visiting gmail.com to view messages be considered “notification” but visiting the messaging system on my site to view notifications not be considered “notification”? It seems like that would give unfair preference to big tech companies. If I make them go to Google for notification in addition to notifying them on my website through my own messaging system, I would be giving them double-notification.
I always show a reason, so they will see it when they come to check what messages they have received on the forum. People can always appeal moderation decisions by emailing us. Real humans answer the emails, and the contact link is available in the dropdown menu.
I’d prefer to leave those emails off by default until they clarify the law. I don’t want anyone to ever receive emails when they are manually suspended, silenced, unsuspended, or unsilenced unless I fill out the email textarea.
If you aren’t able to modify Discourse to turn off those emails by default, could you make a stable API that a plugin could hook into to prevent certain notifications? (if it doesn’t already exist — Claude couldn’t find one)
Some kind of hook for that would also be useful for me to be able to write a plugin that prevents emails being sent out when a post in moderation is approved. I never want to send those either, so I always have to go in to sidekiq to manually cancel those jobs. Otherwise the email reminds the user that it took hours to approve their posts and in the meantime they might be feeling bad about it. I was going to have Claude write a plugin, but it said that it would be patching core functionality, and the plugin might break on an update, meaning that I probably still would have to go check Sidekiq each time I approve a post to make sure that the email jobs aren’t being queued.