Ability to view if PM has been read (Moderation ability?)

[fefrei (Felix Freiberger)]

@riking

What if for official warnings, the recipient had a button labeled “Acknowledge” or similar to click that inserted a “action post”:

I like the idea – but it needs some pressure to get all users to acknowledge these messages. Since warnings are quite severe, maybe we could show a red, global banner on every page until the warning is acknowledged?

[jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld)]

I think asking the user to acknowledge the PM is great but still doesn’t deal with the original issue. They can still choose to ignore it, and we’re back where we started not knowing. If there is a big, red, global banner on every page, we have a much higher certainty that they saw it, but still not 100%. Some people ignore large banners on site, as many times they are ads.

[fefrei (Felix Freiberger)]

@jomaxro

Some people ignore large banners on site, as many times they are ads.

We could be even more drastic, e.g. by disallowing posting until there are no unread warnings – but that might be too harsh.

[jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld)]

@fefrei

We could be even more drastic

Part of me likes that idea. If a moderator took the time to write up an official warning, it should be something important that we want them to read. In essence, sending a formal warning would block their account (could use current block system, that would do what is wanted here), and clicking the acknowledge button would unblock their account. This would only allow for one official warning at a time, but I don’t think that’s a problem.

The other part of me feels like I would learn a lot more if I know whether a user read the PM or not, and if they replied. With the block, they go to try and post, get a message saying “You must read and acknowledge the PM”, go click acknowledge (with or without reading), and then post. I feel that if blocking is warranted, I can do so, but I like the idea of seeing if the PM is read, without forcing the user to do so would be more beneficial.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I like this as a mod feature (and for group PMs) though I would implement it in a slightly more interesting way

In the breaks between posts I think we could show the avatars of the users that have read up to that particular point. (only show to staff) I think this can help with help desk and high moderator loads.

Not an urgent feature but would be kind of nice to have.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@sam

In the breaks between posts I think we could show the avatars of the users that have read up to that particular point. (only show to staff) I think this can help with help desk and high moderator loads.

I missed this originally but it’s interesting. One thing we’ve thought about (just as a possibility) is a setting that would prevent people from replying to a topic until they’ve read “enough” of it.

[supermathie (Michael Brown)]

This has interesting overlap with Discourse Policy

[jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld)]

Support for this has been added to group PMs. (3 years ago)

Publish group read state

When in a group, knowing if another user reads a message can be quite useful. A couple of months ago we added the experimental “Publish read state” feature, which after a lot of tweaks is now ready to be safely used. As you may have noticed, this shows who read which post. It adds a new icon and the reader’s count just before the likes: [Screen Shot 2020-02-27 at 15.03.02] If you click the icon, you can also see the reader’s avatars (it works the same way that likes). You will only count as a…