The discussion revolves around creating a PM auto responder in Discourse. Mark_Walkom wants to set up an auto response to direct users with technical questions to the forums due to the high volume of PMs. sam mentions that a dedicated plugin would be required, but also introduces the concept of Workflows and automation, which is still an ongoing experiment.
sam shares some internal use cases for automation, but codinghorror expresses strong dislike for the auto responder feature, suggesting it could be a plugin, but not a built-in feature. Instead, codinghorror recommends disabling PMs or using a workaround.
sam proposes an alternative solution, where a popup alerts users that PMs may take a long time to respond to, and suggests using the forum instead. This idea can be built today using a theme component. Mark_Walkom likes the idea, as it would allow for customizing the content.
The discussion concludes with JammyDodger announcing that the Automation ‘Auto Responder’ script now makes this possible.
I get a tonne of PMs asking technical questions and I don’t have time to answer them, so wanted to setup an auto response telling people to use the forums.
I’ve seen Discourse Response Bot and I was wondering if there was one for PMs that anyone has made?
We don’t have an automated way of doing so at the moment. @j.jaffeux has been experimenting a bit with workflows and this is kind of a use case we would probably cover there.
IF a PM is created to Mark and the user is TL2 or below, respond with auto responder.
To get something like this going today it would require a dedicated plugin.
I can’t seem to find anything about Workflows, can you provide further info?
Workflows and automation is an ongoing experiment we have. Not quite ready for release, we will notify you once it is.
Some ideas of what we currently use automation for internally are:
Yearly we create a PM to manager to remind them to perform an employee review in a secure PM
We have a topic on our dev instance that is automatically assigned to developers on rotation which covers some regular log triage we need to do.
Secret santa is also done in an automation rule, once a year we pair employees at random in a secure message
I kinda.. super hate .. this feature in email and ticketing systems, so I’m not sure I want it in our product?
I mean maybe as a plugin perhaps. But this “automatically tell people I got their email” thing is something that I really do not want in Discourse proper.
Sorry if this is a bit too much radical honesty, but 
My main advice to you is disable PMs. That’s already a feature in your user profile. (And staff can obviously punch through that and send you PMs all they want, just not regular users.)
That’s a bit too much of an all or nothing approach for us I think.
What about leaving the PM button around and alerting with a pop up when they click it that it is going to take you a long time to reply and that it is way better just to ask on the forum
When they type the word “yes” it eventually brings up the pm ux
Something like that could be built today in a theme component
If we could do that and customise the content, then yep! That way we can say something like “Please do not ask technical questions via PM (etc etc)”.
Just to close this one out, this is possible now using the Automation ‘Auto Responder’ script 