So it’s better to say?
Welcome to the Community.
We’re here for you and once you’ve learned your way around a bit feel free to ask us if you need any help.
Until then, you’re on your own
If someone wants to SPAM Moderators how is that damaging? Annoying yes, but it’s not damaging in any way.
That’s a strange way of reading
Confused? Don’t understand? Can’t figure out what’s going on? Need special help? Visit our FAQ, try posting in our member help category and if that doesn’t help, try our email contact form.
Plus, they can reply to the welcome PM as well. Like I said, I think the kinds of users you are referring to are so fundamentally in the woods that I doubt they’ll be able to do much of anything… probably putting a clickable email address on their screen is about all they can handle, they’re not going to read anything else on the screen.
It does in fact nag you about setting up a staff member to be the sender of all system PMs. Relevant section highlighted, this is from a live Discourse install I did a week ago:
I can improve the copy here a bit in the meantime, but the nag is indeed in place.
You are talking apples to oranges. A contact form and a PM are two incredibly different things. If you can’t see that, then this conversation is hopeless. Plus its already been proven that Discourse interaction isn’t as automated as the messages you get via contact form spam.
It is on the about page… so yes it is.
If you seriously think having admin access is the same as “running/moderating” those forums, it is no wonder this conversation is hopeless.
Sandboxing has nothing to do with this… not sure why that’s even mentioned.
And now all of the staff is on the same page and can deal with them member. We did this in vBulletin maybe 2 times in a given 3 years that I was staff there.
We already had it happen on Discourse and appropriately banned the member.
You already have defense mechanisms to prevent this in Discourse… what? you don’t trust them to work in this regard? As they do.
Say that to all of the suspended users we have. 
I can only name one instance where we discovered a banned user create two more accounts to “interact with the forum” and they did it on a reformed level. They got banned again anyway, but they didn’t come back to continue their rant.
In what universe do you believe that? I can show you a handful of experiences where newbies had no problem figuring out how to PM staff/users. TL 1 doesn’t get a lesson… they figure it out. It doesn’t exist prior to TL 1… so they are effectively still a “newbie” to PMs.
I mean seriously… I honestly think you just have your mind set as “no” and can’t see any reason as to why this won’t blow up in the way you imagine.
I’d be willing to bet good money that you are completely wrong on your assumptions here. My experience tells me that.
Now we are getting somewhere, you simply just want to say no. Your solutions are to have everything public. That isn’t a social economy. There isn’t a valid reason why staff can’t always be reached. If TL 0 is being abused by a TL 1 or 2, sucks for them. They won’t remember the Welcome message single line “reply to this message to contact the staff”. No, they will go search for a way to contact the staff and ultimately be depressed that they can’t. They are currently emotional, upset, and won’t think about something they read 20 minutes ago.
You simply don’t understand the social aspect of a community from a moderator point of view. This isn’t a single one off problem, it is a problem that has had a solution for many years. And it has worked for many years.
It would be better if you’d stop looking at the single user and look at the bigger picture here. This isn’t about a single problem, it is about a social economy functioning in a social way. Think of it as an office space. A new hire gets placed in a 4 walled cubicle, and now 2 people are shouting obscenities through the walls at said person, but they aren’t given a phone number. They simply have the “Welcome to Company X” manual where on page 1 it had a glimmer of info on how to contact the president by pressing the red button, but as all manuals do, they guide you to the next several pages so you learn the companies rules, processes, etc. Your mind is well beyond page 1 at this point and the obscenities do nothing but rattle you even further. A phone with speed dials for common staff all of a sudden seems like a massive help!
I’m officially done. I have little hope that you fully understand what this permits in a social convention. I’ve given all of the reason necessary for this feature, it shouldn’t have to be this complicated, so whatever.
Cheers @codinghorror …
This is bringing back memories…
It seems I did this - as system user had been created and sent me a message or similar - so I just specified system in this setting.
There was no mention of how messaging / notifications / emails would be handled - or that I needed to specify an email address for the user. So a messaging update / consideration would be good
Gees @cpradio (nice to see the passion in your writing) … of-course they are different - but they are also similar in terms of there possible abuse by unverified (TL0) users / spammers / bots. And this is perhaps something that should be considered as a part of this conversation.
Actually I have this problem - quite frequently - although the good majority of my users (for a specific forum I am thinking of) are only used to Facebook and phpBB and are in an age group (in the higher end of 35 to 58) which means to say they do not pick up on technology that quickly.
These users are also unable to to easily ask a friend for help - because their friends tend to be more behind than them.
I will concede that my initial thought to fix my problem was just to put in a Private Message button next to New Topic… I haven’t has yet taken any action but have noticed the PM frequency of PM’s has gone down slightly since switching from phpBB for the specific forum I am thinking of. I’m still considering if any action is required.
Yes TL0 users not being able to PM are another thing to consider in this mix.
For me I hate having to click a users avatar to PM - mainly because it takes ~3.5 seconds to load the user card after a click as an admin - but that’s another problem.
And hopefully they will see the banner at the top of their page that says
Confused? Don’t understand? Can’t figure out what’s going on? Need special help? Visit our FAQ, try posting in our member help category and if that doesn’t help, try our email contact form.
Nothing is easier to understand than email. Having a problem as a new user that requires special, private intervention? Maybe you can’t even log in? Email is the way.
If you are really worried about this, you need to provide an easily findable email contact form. Otherwise the users who can no longer log in, or can’t understand what PMs are and how they work as @DeanMarkTaylor provided examples of, are hosed. This also covers any other oddball rare scenarios that require special handling without opening a massive attack surface for all new users, on every Discourse instance there is and will ever be.
Are you saying @cpradio that you have a lot of TL2 users that are abusive to TL0 users in a way that is not publicly visible, eg they send racist hate filled PMs to these users? If so, I suggest you open a new topic on that… As stated earlier in the topic, when I asked for real world examples I got
This is the first I am hearing of some persistent hate campaign by TL1 and TL2 users against TL0 users, and that is something to be deeply concerned about… I would like to hear more about this with examples. Can you open a new topic about that? If you can provide evidence of a systemic hate campaign, that’s a very strong argument in favor of allowing TL0 to flag and PM… In a way that “I am confuzzled as a new user” does not. That sounds urgent.
I am in the “please allow TL0 members to PM staff” camp. I’ve already expressed prior that the subject of my forum comes with context where a TL0 signs up and needs encouragement or help to get involved. This isn’t because they don’t know what they are doing, but because of the massive amounts of context that pertains to my forum’s subject, which is fandom-specific. More like ‘social’ specific.
I think a compromise would easily be made if the ability to allow TL0 to send PMs to staff can be toggled in the other settings for trust levels. It is opt-in, so no sudden “abuse” can befall a forum’s staff if they forget about this single feature.
Let the end-admin chose for themselves what they think is best for their forum. If it doesn’t work for that specific forum, then it doesn’t work. A few seconds to change the TL0 setting to “No PMs whatsoever” and save is all it takes. I am confused why this is an issue.
That is not really what is on the table, the easy engineering solution is to allow all TL0 to PM everyone (via the base TL check for the ability), in the same way that all TL1 can PM everyone.
Thank you for clarifying. In that case, I am still for the option. If any members get spam or other objectionable PMs from TL0s, they can flag them. Since this would be toggable, then an admin can change it whenever it suits them.
In the nearly ten year history of my community, the only times there were ‘PM abuse’ came from members who would be a TL1 or TL2 if I used Discourse at the time. Otherwise, freshly-created accounts PMed me for help on adjusting to the specific social aspects of the community as well as technical help not related to forum functions (it was in relation to specific rules regarding content and how to label it which has nothing to do with how to use the forum itself).
Actually they can’t, as TL0 users cannot flag.
I am speaking of TL1 and above. If there’s a ‘nuke everything from a member’ option, then surely it would cover PMs, not just public posts.
Do they know how to message people on Facebook? If not, then I highly doubt these are the people we should be worried about (I’m not looking for a 1 solution fits all, you won’t find that, but having staff unreachable is hard to explain).
Doesn’t exist, and I don’t find it fair to tell all of your Discourse instances: “Hey, if you want to make it easy for people who need help to contact you, you must put this as a Global Banner at the top of your site, otherwise, they’ll never figure it out.”
Plus this solution bites for other reasons. Users can dismiss the banner and guess what? I bet that’s the first thing they do after they sign up and login. So that brings us back to TL 0 has no way to easily communicate with staff.
That’s a different problem. The problem here is having no way for a TL 0 user to communicate easily with staff. Let’s not try to make the problem go outside of its boundaries.
I won’t say it hasn’t happened, but the number is likely small, but you completely missed my point in my post, so I don’t even know how to respond to this… other than I’m not the one trying to alter the initial underlying problem, and that is TL 0 can’t easily communicate with staff.
So let’s re-focus here. The issue: TL 0 can’t easily communicate with staff. Heck, I’ll rename the topic to be that to make this easier
Yes, that is one example, I can’t think of the 99 million reasons why a TL 0 would want to contact staff privately, I just know they want to, and should be able to. If they are a spammer, they get nixed. There are limitations stopping them from sending X PMs a day, and they are limited to how many they can send a PM to, so I don’t see why this is such a big deal.
Yes, they do - they also found it easy to private message in phpBB.
And yet the site point topic asking for feedback on this has zero real replies?
The case you have made for this is very weak, considering it opens up a huge griefing vector for new users. However I want to hear more about these examples;
And
Specifically about the obscenities and abuse refrerenced above.
I am inclined to let tl0 users flag pms if this is the case. That is a tiny griefing vector (with a very legitimate justification, if new users are getting abused by other users in pms) compared to making it open season on all staff for all new users, for every Discourse instance.
I understand you want to help new users. I know a little about this since I co founded one of the 50 largest websites on the Internet that helps new users, Stack Overflow. Allowing new users to private message staff is not the way to help these people – at least, not at the cost of hassling and griefing and help vampirism on your staff.
There are other, better, less dangerous ways to deal with this, which I have suggested several times above.
@codinghorror With your permission I’ll gladly lock you into TL0 at SitePoint for a while if you want some first-hand experience as a teacher. Game?
Sure you can delete my account from there if you want and I can just join as a new user under an email you won’t recognize. Go ahead and delete it all.
I’m not talking about Deleting an account, but about how one as a TLO member would PM Staff.
Let’s bear in mind how people get to TL1:
So TL0 is a rather transitory state; remaining at TL0 means the user isn’t doing much on the site at all!
(you guys control these knobs, so you could turn them down to make TL1 easier to achieve if desired!)
Now that you mention it, I have “power levelled” myself to TL1 on external Discourse sites before for various reasons, including that I actually did want to PM someone. To do this I simply read a bunch of topics on the site as per above.
OK, you’re not game to try, sorry
