A user, ChrisBeach, reported not receiving notifications for private messages (PMs) they were invited to. jomaxro and codinghorror acknowledged the issue and discussed possible solutions.
jomaxro suggested that being invited to a PM should set the user’s notification state to “watching,” allowing them to receive future notifications. sam agreed, proposing that users should automatically “watch” a PM upon invitation and have the option to receive an email notification.
The discussion led to a potential flow change for PM invites, including an invite email with a summary of the conversation and the option to accept or decline. sam suggested this would improve the user experience, especially for those not frequently using the site.
The issue was addressed by tgxworld, who implemented a change to set the notification level to “watching” when a user visits or replies to a PM. However, tgxworld and sam continued to discuss the details, including the notification level for groups and the addition of a site-wide setting.
I was recently invited to a PM conversation involving a moderator and member of my site.
This turned into quite an important conversation because the member was discussing paying for advertising on my forum (and had just paid, and wanted to know if I’d received the payment).
Unfortunately I never saw her most recent PM message. Discourse never alerted me to it in any way. I only found it when I saw an unexpected payment in my bank account from that member! Eventually I browsed to my messages page, and there was the message.
IMO when I’m invited into a PM chain, I should be notified of new messages in that chain.
Just tested this. I did receive a notification that I was invited to a PM. However, my notification state remained normal, so I indeed was not notified of future messages. @codinghorror, my opinion is that being invited to a PM should set my notification state to watching, and users can change that if wanted. I think defaulting to normal (and thus not easily knowing that there are more messages) is not ideal.
Edit: To emphasize, this suggestion is for message invites only. Topics are visible in /latest so it’s not a major concern. PMs are quite hidden if you’re not notified.
Keep in mind that PM invites are “blue” notifications not “green”, so if you get a lot of notifications all at the same time, it’s possible to miss it.
Perhaps if we change the flow it would make more sense:
Invite to a PM:
Triggers an invite email, “Bob invited you to XYZ conversation, with a summary of the last few posts, would you like to accept” (email notification if you are not on site, green notification if you are out of the box)
You click accept and are added into the PM as watching
I do agree that the “I can just silently add people to a PM if they want to or not” as any user is a problem, we need a different flow for people being pulled in to a discussion vs people who are there from get go.
I need to clarify what we actually want here because we’re currently setting the notification level to tracking once a user replies to any topic. Is the intention to update the code such that the notification level is watching for PM and tracking for normal topics?
I’m not sure which copy we’re referring to here. Is this for the mailer?
I need to clarify this feature as well. Is this for closed groups only or is this a site wide setting? What is the difference between “watch as soon as invited” and “watch_messages_on_invite”?
, I totally forgot that groups have a