I’d love to be able to have a URL that I could give to people, or easily put into a theme component, where if they clicked it, it would start a personal chat with that person or it would continue an already ongoing personal chat.
Yes, this would also be useful for the community I’m administrating!
As context:
When setting up our Discourse instance, we decided to disable DMs in favor of the newer Chat function. We thought it would be confusing for our community members to have both.
Our Discourse has a category for support. I just replied to a topic where I used a DM link to my own profile (following the docs link above posted by @jimkleiber) to ask a member to share potentially private info with me, to continue helping him privately. But of course, we disabled DMs, so that didn’t work.
Having a simple link that opens a chat with a certain username would be helpful. Other pre-filled information isn’t that important for us.