Creating pre-filled personal message links

Documentation Using Discourse
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:bookmark: This guide describes how to create a link to start a new personal message with pre-filled information, including best practices.

:person_raising_hand: Required user level: All users

Discourse allows you to compose a new personal message with pre-filled information via URL parameters. This can save time and ensure consistency for common messages.

Structure of the URL

To create a new pre-filled message, format your URL like this:

https://discourse.example.com/new-message?username=techapj&title=message%20title&body=message%20body

When broken down, the URL parameters include:

  • Base URL: https://discourse.example.com/new-message
  • Username: username=techapj
  • Title: title=message%20title
  • Body: body=message%20body
  • The ? URL operator to add the different options

You can try this on try.discourse.org:

https://try.discourse.org/new-message?username=rudy&title=message%20title&body=message%20body

You can also compose a pre-filled message for a group via URL:

https://meta.discourse.org/new-message?groupname=team&title=topic%20title&body=topic%20body`

Notice the groupname param in above URL, this means that you want to create a new pre-filled message for a group (as opposed to username for composing a message for user).

Best practices

  • You can send message to multiple users by comma separating the usernames. For example

    https://meta.discourse.org/new-message?username=foo,bar

  • You don’t need to fill in all of the params. For example any of these would work:

    https://meta.discourse.org/new-message
https://meta.discourse.org/new-message?username=
https://meta.discourse.org/new-message?title=foo&body=bar
https://meta.discourse.org/new-message?groupname=

  • You can add line spaces using the %0A and %0A%0D codes to give some structure to the body of the message:

    https://yoursite.discourse.org/new-message?username=test_user&title=Bug%20Report&body=Please%20include%20all%20relevant%20details.%0A%0DCPU:%0AMemory:%0A%0DDescribe%20Issue:

  • If you have SSO, you can link to example.com/session/sso and then set the return path to create the personal message. If the user is already logged in they will be redirected automatically to the url supplied by the return path. If they aren’t logged in they will be taken to the sso login page and then redirected to the return path url. The return path will need to be url encoded.

    href="http://localhost:3000/session/sso?return_path=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A3000%2Fnew-message%3Fusername%3Dscossar%26title%3DInformation+requested+about+gentle+yoga+classes">

Currently not supported

  • Use the pre-filled URL to compose a message to multiple groups.
  • Use the pre-filled URL to open the composer in a user’s summary page.
  • Using email instead of the username to pre-fill a personal message.

Additional resources

Last edited by @hugh 2024-06-28T02:53:33Z

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56 Likes
55

Can tags be assigned with this as well? I tried mimicking the tag implementation from here but didn’t have any luck.

56

I’m pretty sure it’s the same code. What URL did you try? You can replace the hostname with meta.discourse.org if you need to (just don’t actually create the topic!)

Are you sure that you used something like tags=email,planned and that the tags exist and can be applied by the user that was trying to use the link?

1 Like
57

Here is the URL that I was using:

https://developer.sailpoint.com/discuss/new-message?groupname=community_managers&title=Livestream%20Presentation%20Submission&tags=livestream&body=I%20would%20like%20to%20present%20a%20livestream%21%20Here%20is%20an%20overview%20of%20my%20presentation%3A%0A%0ATopic%3A%20%5B%5Binsert%20topic%20here%5D%5D%0ADescription%3A%20%5B%5Binsert%20description%20here%5D%5D

You raise a valid point about permissions with tags, though. Is the PM able to be created with the tag hidden?

58

Can the user create the PM with the desired tags normally via the UX? (Hint: Not the way you have it configured.) The URL is just a way to seed what the user might do in the UX. It doesn’t have magic powers.

There is a site setting that enables tags for PMs. No, a user cannot create a tag that they do not have rights to see.

1 Like
59

I confirmed that:

:frowning: