Creating pre-filled personal message links

Documentation Using Discourse
1

: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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