Is there a way to disable watched words blocking in private messages while they continue to be active in topics and posts?
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Hello Ed,
Unfortunately this is not possible the watched words are picked up in both topics and personal messages. Its a good idea to keep it that way because PMs is where a lot of action happens because users think they are behind closed doors they can do as they please etc.
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Thanks for a quick reply!
Private messages with words of observation are now popping up in our forum. I don’t think that’s a good way to go,
Private messages must be private. That’s also a part of data protection and data protection is very important in Germany.
Is there another way to monitor words so that private messages are not affected? Any Ideas?
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There are no private messages in Discourse. They are called personal messages. Admins can visit your profile and read all your messages easily. (And even if they could not do it from the interface, they could download a backup). To prevent that you can use Discourse Encrypt
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That is not the point and admins are a speciality in their function.
I’m a moderator and now I get to read personal messages unintentionally because a watched word was used.
Privacy is really an important issue and violates the policy.
How can I work around this so that personal messages are not reported by the system when a watched word is used?
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In my first post above, System will pick up words in PMs and normal posts/topics. At the moment, you can’t choose where you want system to look so you’d have a create a Feature request. In the meantime, your best bet is to use another option in the watched words list such as block, censor or require approval.
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Just to add another voice to the views above, I would really like to have the option to watch words without being alerted to their use in personal messages. I understand that admins can, if we want, read users’ personal messages, but I would want that only to happen if we made an affirmative choice to read those messages, not for it to happen by accident because a PM showed up in our notifications whenever someone used a watched word.
On my instance, we recently made a policy change about how members can discuss a particular political issue. It’s an extremely touchy subject, one that our users hold conflicting views about, and one that can easily spiral out of control, so the watched words are to give the moderation team early warning that a discussion is taking place.
We do not want warning that individual users are discussing this topic in messages. I’m not going to name the political issue, but I imagine people reading this might be able to make a good guess. We don’t want to discourage discussion of this topic in personal messages, as I’m sure will happen if users become aware the moderators are reading their messages as a matter of course. We just want to use moderation tools to keep a handle on public discussions.