Are banned members supposed to receive email notifications?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around whether banned members should receive email notifications. WorldIsMine shared an incident where a banned user received email notifications for private remarks made by admins in a three-way PM. simon explained that, according to the Suspended user section of https://meta.discourse.org/t/description-of-various-user-states-in-discourse/35171, emails initiated by staff members are sent to suspended users to allow staff to communicate with them.

The conversation shifted to the use of whisper posts, which do not create notifications for non-staff users. codinghorror suggested using whispers, and WorldIsMine mentioned that they already use the feature but find it cumbersome. WorldIsMine plans to modify the whisper feature via a plugin to make it more obvious when it’s enabled.

codinghorror pointed out that replies to whispers are always whispers, reducing the need for manual toggling. bts suggested adding a more obvious indicator when the whisper feature is enabled, such as changing the background color or adding a border. WorldIsMine thanked the contributors for their suggestions and agreed that Discourse should make the whisper feature more obvious.

1

A scenario that happened to our admins last night:

  1. Two admins and a user are in a three-way PM.
  2. The user became aggressive, we’ve proceeded to ban him.
  3. The other admin and I still used the PM to communicate, we’ve made some private (or so we thought) remarks about the user for the next 20-30 minutes.
  4. The banned user received email notifications on every reply, despite being banned.

Is this by design? Because it seems like a flaw.

2

According to the Suspended user section of Understanding user statuses, roles, and permissions, emails initiated by staff members are sent to suspended users. The purpose of this is to allow staff to have a channel of communication with suspended users.

I can see how being unaware of this bahaviour could lead to an awkward situation. Ideally, the admins on your site would have used whisper posts for your internal communication. Whispers posts do not create notifications for non-staff users.

3

I see. Yes, it was awkward indeed. Thank you for the prompt explanation. Makes sense now.

4

I apologize, but this is a little bit funny to me. I realize it is probably not at all funny to the people involved.

Have you enabled the whisper feature? It is great for scenarios like this. :shushing_face:

5

If you only seen what we wrote :confused: The client was super, super pissed.
Anyway, yes, we do use the whisper feature, too much in fact. But that particular time we thought we were clear. In fact, we use the whisper so much that I am thinking about modding it a tad via a plugin, as I find that:

  1. For someone who whispers a lot (most our admins do due to the nature of our site), we find it cumbersome to click two times to get to the option.
  2. Quite often admins become so numb to the feature (routine?) that they forget to turn whisper on. I plan to change the button to a different color (the submit button) once Whisper is picked. It’s easy to forget yourself (that Whisper isn’t on when replying) and then look like crazies when our members see these messages.
6

One thing that may help is to note that replies to Whispers are always Whispers. So you only need to worry about the manual toggle when:

  • you are not replying to a previous whisper in the topic

or

  • you are making the very first whisper in a topic

TL;DR reply to a whisper and you get a whisper with no extra button presses.

7

Another thing to note, there is an extra class composing-whisper applied when you toggle it on, so you could make the preview more obvious too if you want.

Currently it does apply font-style: italic; to the preview but you could also add something to make it even more super obvious like:

.composing-whisper .d-editor-preview {
    background: #960000;
    padding: 20px;
    border: 5px solid #ffd600;
}

I guess this wouldn’t be useful for replies on mobile. But yeah changing the button I think would be an easy CSS tweak as well!

8

Awesome, thanks! Will try this out. That’s what I wanted. Staring at the site for countless hours a day it’s hard to notice when Whisper is on, IMO Discourse needs to make it more obvious.