I think that sounds like how they worked pre-sidebar/pre-enabled_groups setting. With PM’s disabled for non-staff users a user would get a notification, but no access to the message tabs in their menu or user page (though they could still access them directly if they knew the address).
Though I think it works slightly differently now for the similar direct_message_enabled_groups, so this may be something to marry up and make more consistent.
I think that’s reasonable grounds to revisit this, but the messages UI comes with more complexity right now (with it’s inbox, sent, etc). And you can close a direct message to remove it from your sidebar, whereas that’s not something you can do with messages.
Agree this is a bit of an odd duck, but we may let it sit for a bit before we dig into making any changes here.
Some of my users find it really confusing; after reading the private message they are unable to locate their PMs; despite their inability to send new PMs. Hopefully this can be changed to something more clearer for our users sometime =)
I just gave this a quick test here on meta and see that my TL0 test user account does not have any UI to access messages, even after I have sent it a message and I have used it to send a message to moderators.
Meanwhile, that user can go to https://meta.discourse.org/my/messages to access their inbox.
Now that the messages UI has changed and there is simply a “My messages” link in the sidebar, I think it would be worthwhile making a change here to provide that same link when a user has messages. There can also be a messages filter in the notifications menu as there is for people who are allowed to send messages, as another way to get to your messages. Here’s how it looks now for my test user. Eventually that notification will disappear off the bottom and I will lose my easy access to my messages.
I think it depends very much on how PMs are used whether it makes sense to see links to the inbox in the interface.
To me, it always made sense that those are hidden. By default, PMs are only disabled for TL0. So as soon as the user has spent 10 minutes reading, they can see their inbox. I don’t expect them to receive that many messages until that has happened and I don’t expect them to receive so many notifications that they won’t at least be able to find it in the full list of notifications. For me, this was always part of simplifying the interface for new users.
I don’t think a new user needs the inbox with all these tabs at the top for reading the first few welcome messages. Especially the dropdown for (group) inboxes is not needed by most users. As long as you are not in at least one group to which messages can be sent, there is a dropdown with exactly one option: inbox.
I think visiting PMs right from the notification simplifies the experience compared to looking at your inbox. And a permanently visible link to that in the sidebar makes users looking at that more likely.
However, I understand how hiding the inbox can be a problem on sites that don’t allow PMs even on higher trust levels (or for most groups), because then it’s not just hidden for new users to simplify the interface. But in that case, who is messaging the user?
To me, hiding the link by default as long as the user isn’t allowed to send PMs makes sense. If there are sites that frequently use PMs without allowing users to create them so their users still need access to the inbox, why don’t the admins simply add a link to the inbox to the sidebar?
