I’m happy to share that we’ve recently implemented the first version of this functionality, which will let you create a link to start a new chat with one or more users. You can try this in your community with the following URL…
https://[COMMUNITY]/chat/new-message?recipients=[USER1, USER2, ETC.]
…where you’ll replace:
[COMMUNITY]with your community URL (e.g.,meta.discourse.org)[USER1, USER2, ETC.]with the username(s) of the member you want to chat with. If creating a link to start a chat with multiple members, separate with commas.
For now, this only works for direct messages to one or more individuals.
As you give this a go, please let us know if there are more improvements we could make here to better support your community!