I would like a site setting that allows TL0 to PM staff

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Please: delete my account over there. I’d like you to do that. Then I can re-join under a different email as a TL0 user.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

The tempers are high here cause the discussion is not framed right.

Instead of:

Every instance of Discourse should allow TL0 to PM staff

Which understandably makes @codinghorror worried about potential problems.

I would like a site setting that allows TL0 to PM staff

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Then … enable the site setting on your forum and come back in 1-3 months with stats about how useful it has been.

[TechnoBear]

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.

We seem to have different definitions of “new users” here. Surely anybody who signs up to a forum for the first time is a new user of that forum, irrespective of how knowledgeable or otherwise they may be about computers, the Internet or whatever. That’s the point. We would like new members to be able to contact staff, irrespective of their skill level.

A site setting, as Sam suggests, seems fine to me.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

I would like a site setting that allows TL0 to PM staff

I think it should be a site setting that allows TL0 users to PM moderators only since administrator status is invisible to them.

TL0 users should also probably be able to flag PMs by default as noted above too.

[purldator (mountain)]

@sam

I would like a site setting that allows TL0 to PM staff

@purldator

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.

@codinghorror

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.

I understand the need to make sure a hard setting in every Discourse instance is safe on default. A lot of this can be fixed by making it opt-in for an administrator to set. Sure, it means that is one extra thing they have to toggle. But if you make it clear that certain settings need not be concerned with when installing and setting up, then this shouldn’t impede on the time it takes to get a Discourse forum up and running.

I re-quote:

@purldator

I am confused why this is an issue.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

There is a difference between “nice to have in theory” (where the theory is particularly tenous – TL0 is a brief, transitory state, and users who can’t log in need a clear FAQ to refer to which has out of band contact information, too) and “needed due to clear and present danger”.

I just don’t recall ever hearing this request before, not in the 2 years we’ve had Discourse as a live public project, and from zero other customers. I would like to hear a few other customers asking for it before we work on it. And again, I think time spent improving your new user FAQ and new user on boarding will pay off a thousand times more, and scale infinitely better, than one to one PMs with staff. Plus zero added risk.

I do think there is danger in TL0 users not being able to flag potentially abusive PMs, even if there is no evidence of this actually happening, the downside is severe, with very little change in attack surface, and we will take action on that.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I updated the default new install site setting nag copy to:

Set the graphic logos for your site. Update logo_url, logo_small_url, and favicon_url in Site Settings.

Enter a site contact email address so new users and users who can’t log in, as well as other webmasters and system administrators, can reach you for urgent matters. Update contact_email in Site Settings.

Enter a name for your site. Update title in Site Settings.

Enter a one sentence description of your site that will appear in search results. Update site_description in Site Settings.

Enter the name of a friendly staff user account to send important automated private messages from, such as new user welcome, flag warnings, etc. Update site_contact_username in Site Settings

I also think we should provide a way to indirectly mail whoever is at the contact_email via the /about page, obviously not exposing the email directly.

This happens to us too – we may need to contact Ye Olde Discourse instances to help them upgrade and that can be a pain since on older instances there is no /about page … you don’t know who the staff are, much less which ones have admin ability on the site!

[cpradio]

And yet the site point topic asking for feedback on this has zero real replies?

Welcome to Sitepoint where our members rant about things in their own topics but refuse to help us identify and solve the issues, so we’re left with trying to figure this out for them. sigh A typical problem I believe most discussion forums have…

The case you have made for this is very weak, considering it opens up a huge griefing vector for new users.

I don’t understand the “huge griefing vector” if we are talking about staff/moderators only. Explain how that is a “huge griefing vector” to me. It would be likely 1-3% of the user base and if you take into account they can only PM 1 person at a time under TL 2 and the daily cap on PMs, it greatly lowers that percentage. The numbers don’t lie here.

I can name a handful of members this has happened to in the past and not to long ago present (granted, the abuse was definitely visible publicly too, for the ones that I remember, but whose to say it didn’t start privately? and you had to be watching those topics – no idea if it was also happening privately though, as I don’t have the ability to see PMs).

The problem is, most of our new members do not immediately go out of their own topic for days. They simply came with one issue in mind and look to get it resolved. If a search doesn’t show what they want, they create a topic and only work within that topic. So they are TL 0 for days, maybe a week.

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.

That’s a bad example. StackOverflow has done nothing but remove all social conventions to be strictly Q&A. Discourse is completely different in this regard, you want social conventions. You can’t assume all users are technical, you have to assume many know very little about technology and are looking to join a discussion, or get help regarding a scenario/problem they have.

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.

Already happens, and we ban those members accordingly. We actually had this happen while on Discourse already. You can’t stop the vampirism on your staff. We must deal with that regardless.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I really don’t see much point in arguing this anymore, make a PR with the site setting. You can test it out for a few months and come back to us with numbers / examples.

The Discourse team will not be working on this site setting, cause we honestly do not believe it will make much of a difference.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Closing this for now – we think there are much more effective ways to spend this effort to help new users – but I am open to such a setting once a few more customers organically request it on their own.

This topic is now closed. New replies are no longer allowed.