I (along with @GamersInternational ) am a Moderator on a Forum powered by Discourse and we are having some issues with users abusing DMs and Chat, and would like to disable ALL user-to-user private communications.
Our Forum Admins have found the corresponding settings:
1. Direct Message enabled groups
2. Chat allowed Groups
3. Personal Message Enabled Groups
The 3rd option seems to be the one that breaks it: specifically, changing the 3rd setting to only moderators/admins:
1. Removes the inbox shortcut from all normal users but still is accessible via the URL. Meaning, if they are sent a Personal Message from staff, they can only access from the notifications bar which is extremely annoying and likely a bug Messages not visible in sidebar if messages are disabled
2. No longer can allow normal users to add category-moderators, moderators, or ANY staff group to the DM to actually talk to them
We need our users to be able to both Access their Inbox as well as be able to add staff groups to flagged message removal inquiries.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by that, but I thought I’d share that users can send personal messages to groups even if they aren’t in a Personal Message Enabled Groups group.
You can configure who is able to message a group in the group’s settings
But then it’s still difficult for users to notice that they can do this. I added a link to the inbox and links to prefilled messages to some groups into a public custom sidebar section. (I hide it from logged in users with Navigation (sidebar) menu display control)
Since Personal Message Enabled Groups only prevents users from creating new PMs, your admin might also want to close all existing conversations between users. Maybe the Discourse team can help you with that with some kind of bulk operation.
It seems like there was some miscommunication here oops. Essentially, users can send DMs to the group if they go to the groups page, but they can’t just add the group to an existing DM (for post removals, we have edited the default text to mention that users should add the category-moderators group if they want more information on why it was removed).
Can you clarify: are we talking about direct messages in chat (DMs) or personal messages (PMs) which appear in your inbox? You say DMs but the topic is tagged with personal-messages
