The purpose of this change is to declutter the sidebar — since most members only have access to a single inbox anyway, this single link works just as well but takes up less space.
By default, the My Messages link is visible in the top section. Admins can customize the top section to further deemphasize messages by moving this link into the More menu:
Click the More button in the top sidebar section.
Click Customize this section.
Drag the My Messages section down into the More menu section.
If members want to add back more access to messages, they customize their personal sidebars to add more links by clicking the + icon in the bottom of the sidebar.
Is there a reason why, in contrast to, for example, “My Posts”, “My Messages” is also shown to users who are logged out? And why does it take me to https://meta.discourse.org/login-preferences?
I also noticed that while messages are hidden in most menus for users who are not member of a personal message enabled groups, the new link in the sidebar is not.
Two examples where it’s hidden:
I get that and I understand that is true 90% of the time.
But one of my main gripes with those group inboxes is that they were are so hard to find, which especially bites people on the more advanced setups.
And the sidebar kinda solved that… so it would be nice if this could be a user preference.
Have you considered a GROUPS section (default turned off) in the sidebar which lists groups who the user is a member of? And then navigates to the Group message tab by default (with a blue indicator if there is a new message)? I know that they can navigate to https://meta.discourse.org/g?type=my, but that adds at least one more step and doesn’t surface the messages.
Personally, I’d find this very useful for managing groups and their messages more effectively, and enabling users to find their groups more easily.
A workaround is a custom sidebar section that links to the group boxes you care about.
Longer term one thing I think about is maybe we should have a totally custom sidebar when you are in messages mode, like you get for docs / ai / admin.
On my personal site, I had customized the first section in my sidebar, so the “My posts” and “My messages” links were not present even upon updating to the latest version of Discourse.
I was able to add them myself by editing the sidebar section and copying the setup from here on meta. The icon for My posts is User, and the icon for My messages is Inbox.
