The discussion revolves around customizing notifications and private messaging settings in Discourse. chriscant wants to receive in-browser or app notifications for specific categories without emails, and is unsure if this is possible. tobiaseigen suggests checking user preferences to control email notifications.
chriscant clarifies that selecting “never” for emails would still allow notifications for watched categories, which is the desired behavior. chriscant also mentions switching off private messaging to keep things simple and due to concerns about message visibility.
tobiaseigen advises chriscant and the volunteers to spend time exploring the software to find answers to their questions. Additionally, tobiaseigen mentions that encryption plugins are available for secure private messaging, but notes that users should be aware that admins can see their messages.
Hello. Thanks very much for making this software available as open-source which we’re hosting ourselves for our UK non-profit volunteers.
The flexibility is in general great, as there are some volunteers who want to do everything by email, and many who will want to do things in more modern ways. Myself, I’d like to have notifications (in browser or app) for categories of interest, say, but don’t want mails. Is there a way to do this out of the box?
On a separate note, we’ve switched off private messaging as far as possible as all these messages can be seen by admins which users may not expect. I do want users to be able to get in touch with moderators (ideally when online or by email) but the received posts and any discussion to be private to the moderators. I’ve tried using groups and a private category but haven’t been able to achieve this so far.
“Privacy” of personal messaging has been discussed at length here - you might try using the search. Like with any system, I don’t think users expect that admins cannot see their messages… if they do then they are sorely mistaken. The only way to do that is with encryption keys, which I think is available as a plugin -Discourse Encrypt (deprecated) - though I’ve not tried it.
Here on meta there are lots of admins who can see everything.. in my community it’s only one person. Moderators do not see personal messages except their own.
If I select “never” there does that stop email notifications for categories I’m watching for example? It’s that that I don’t need.
I agree that most people would realise that admins can see their messages. In fact, it’s important to cope in the (unlikely) situations where someone has done something untoward in private messages. Another reason for switching them off is partly to keep things simple like our previous Yahoo groups. From my experiments, there doesn’t seem to be an simple place where all my messages are listed - but maybe I’m not seeing it as we’ve switched them off.
Hi Chris! My suggestion would be that you and your volunteers spend some time with the software to get to know how it works. I think you will find answers to these questions on your own.
