The discussion is about changing the email address of the system account in Discourse. David_Collantes initially tried to set an email address for the system account but encountered issues with email confirmation. He suggests making the system account exempt from email confirmations/verifications.
ChrisBeach shares a related issue where users sent private messages to the system account, expecting to reach the admin team, but the messages were not received by the admins. He proposes that messages sent to the system account should become group PMs that include all admins.
Falco suggests using the site contact username setting instead of the system account for official site contact. ChrisBeach explains that they use the system account for official site posts to make it clear that they represent the site.
Falco points out that Discourse has a feature to make official announcements by adding a staff color to posts. ChrisBeach shares how they use this feature to highlight moderation interventions and shares a CSS snippet to style these posts.
David_Collantes requests the CSS snippet, which ChrisBeach shares.
The discussion highlights the need to make the system account more special and exempt from certain features, and explores alternative solutions for official site contact and announcements.
The system account on my play install had the email no_email. As an admin, I tried changing it, but misspell it. When I tried to change it again, it tells me “We’ve sent an email to that address. Please follow the confirmation instructions.” What now?
Is it a bug? Shouldn’t the system (or whatever one decides to rename it to) be exempt of email confirmations/verifications?
Why are you changing the system account’s e-mail address?
I wasn’t changing it, even though I wrote “changing.” My mistake. What was on the email field, no_email wasn’t an email address, so I was simply setting an email for it. It has a little pencil icon, it allowed me to enter an email address. If I weren’t supposed to set it, why was I allowed to?
I was able to correct the incorrectly entered email (just suddenly allowed me), but email confirmation to that account is never received. Email is working fine for everything else.
I strongly recommend the system account be make really special (no preferences, nothing else). As an admin, one can impersonate system and I can see it as if it were a regular user. It seems it isn’t.
When I last impersonated system, I found that users had sent private messages to it, expecting to reach the admin team.
Yet no admins had received a notification of this. It was pure luck I randomly chose to impersonate system and see the messages.
Personally, I think messages sent to system should become group PMs that include all admins, and maybe moderators.
I’ve found that using the setting site contact username is the best approach in this case.
I did indeed do that (the site contact username is me).
But for official site posts (example), we change ownership to “system” to make it clear that they represent the site and are not personally related to any one admin/moderator.
It would be great to continue to do so, and to have any PMs sent to “system” turn into group PMs to the moderators
Oh, so tha’s why.
Discourse has a (somewhat hidden) feature for that.
Click on the post wrench and Add Staff Color to make an official announcement. You may need to style this post type to better fit your design.
That way you can use real people for announcements and your readers can differentiate when you are talking as a member or as the admin.
Share that snippet, please. I like it!
.post-stream .moderator a.main-avatar img {
border: 2px inset yellow; margin-top: -2px; margin-left: -2px;
box-shadow: 0px 0px 2px #880;
}
.post-stream .moderator .names, .post-stream .moderator .topic-body .names span a {
color: #880;
}
.post-stream .moderator .topic-body {
background-color: #ffffea;
}
.post-stream .moderator span.user-title {
display: none;
}
.post-stream .moderator .names:after {
content: "Moderator";
}