A discussion is underway about adding a Group Inbox tab to a group’s page on Discourse. alehandrof proposed this feature, citing its importance in making groups more useful, particularly when switching from private categories to group PMs.
The current issue is that users can send messages to groups but cannot view conversations on the group’s homepage. alehandrof created a mockup of the proposed feature, which includes a tab alongside Members and Activity to display the group’s inbox.
codinghorror and sam expressed support for the idea, but noted that it was not initially slotted for a release. However, tgxworld confirmed that the feature was being worked on and has since been merged (commit).
alehandrof is currently busy but plans to provide feedback on the changes once available.
I can visit a group’s homepage. From there, I can send a Message to the group. But I can’t see any of the conversations that we’ve been having. This is counter-intuitive.
Solution
There should be a tab, alongside Members and Activity, that displays that group’s inbox (if it’s available). Like this:
I think this is so critical, I would making it the default tab that you see when you enter the group.
Background
I’ve added Groups to the main nav because I’m slowly shifting from using private categories to group PMs. Adding the inbox to a group’s page would make groups a lot more useful. It’s an issue that my users have found confusing. When they want to send a message to a group they have to go to “Messages”, not “Groups”. (Both are options available on our site’s top nav.)
I’m switching some groups over from Basecamp to Discourse. Basecamp’s Message Board is more streamlined than Discourse’s group messaging, so I’m preparing my users for some rough seas ahead.
I was wondering, though, what’s the ETA for the implementation of something like what I mocked up here? 1.10?
This is an actual issue we are already experiencing in our internal usage. Looking through our community inbox (a group I do not belong to) is a pain due to the UI being in the “wrong mode”. We support cleaning this up.
However it is not slotted to a release yet, I anticipate this happening somewhere between 4 weeks from now to 6 months from now unless one of our enterprise customers pushes us to have this earlier.
For the record, messages exist as a filter under: /activity/messages in groups its just that the UI mode is wrong, it should display the same as it does under a user’s profile complete with the archived filter and a top level tab.
Hi Alan. This is great news! I’m currently organising a face-to-face event and that’s taking up most of my waking hours. As soon as that settles down a bit, I’ll take a look at the merged changes and get back to you. Apologies for not being able to respond more quickly!
