Make Personal Message

I’ve just launched an install of Discourse and have added some “staff” who are board members for the org.

One of the first things to have happened is that one of them hit the wrench at the bottom of a post and made it a personal message by accidentally clicking “Make personal message.”

I’m guessing I’m not the first one that has a mix of technical and non-technical “staff.” Is there a way to force the staff to confirm that they intended to do this? Or completely disable this for staff but leave it for admins for now? I don’t see a setting that controls this.

Thanks.

When you say staff, do you mean moderators, or simply people from your org who are normal members on Discourse?

And do you realise that you can easily change that personal message back into a public topic?

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Sorry for the confusion.

We have a user group called “staff.” I’m pretty sure it was included in the install and I didn’t set it up. In our case we’re using it for Board Members and the main reason I’d like to keep them in it is because they have access to private category via that user group.

Yes, I changed it back to a public topic, but the only reason I figured out it had been changed was because someone said they couldn’t see it and I went digging for the issue. Was it supposed to send me a notification?

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The default Staff group that comes with Discourse is for all Admins and Moderators. To be in that group (and in fact to see that menu item at all, come to think of it) the user must be at least a moderator so no, the function can’t be turned off.

No, it doesn’t send a notification but TBH I’ve never heard of this happening before so I suspect you may be trying to fix something globally for a one off issue that is reasonably easily rectified.

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What you want to do is create a group called something like organization-name-staff, add the users, and give access to the category in question. You don’t want them to be moderators or admins.

@pfaffman and @HAWK

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll create that other group and hope that the other issue becomes a non-issue.

For something that is to all intents and purposes reversible, I think a confirmation dialogue is overkill, imho, and would be annoying for experienced staff. Save confirmation dialogue boxes for actions that are irreversible or at least really difficult to reverse.

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