Allow post author to see/reply to whisper posts

Continuing the discussion from How do I create a whisper post?:

I like whisper posts and am finding them to be very useful. One use case that seems to be missing for me is the ability to include the post author in the aside conversation. I regularly write to post authors to let them know about edits, give them tips on improving their discussions and encourage them to invite certain people to contribute etc. I’d rather do it in a whisper (with moderators able to see) then a private message to the person.

2 Likes

Would be a pretty big change permission wise, in general OP asides should go in PMs, why are they not working for you here?

2 Likes

I wonder if there was ever any implentation of this since 2016? It looks like this wasn’t implemented into whispers, but perhaps there is an alternative plugin or theme component I haven’t seen?

Our use case here is:

  1. AI catches a low effort topic “I need help”
  2. AI creates a reply that is hidden to everyone except admin and OP. Content: “Here are some changes you need to make to your topic to get help”
  3. OP follows the guidance of AI and makes changes within 48 hours or we automatically hide the topic

The part which is missing from this flow is the reply/whisper that is visible to only the User and Staff.

Ideally we would use the modal window for this feedback, but we’re looking for a hidden reply like this just in case our IT policy prevents the webhooks needed for the modal window.

Looking at the documentation, whispers are only visible to the given groups, but we need the topic author to also see it.

We could reply and unlist it till the user has made changes, but this is quite unwelcoming and not something we want to introduce. In particular false positives would result in hiding perfectly good posts, discouraging our best users.

I saw these to slightly related topics, but feel they are very different use cases and implementation:

I also found this plugin but it seems to make all replies private to the OP: Discourse Private Replies

1 Like