Private Message Can't Be Reached with private messaging disabled

ux
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Hello everyone

Thanks for a great community and a great software you’ve built.

Recently, the private messages have completely vanished from our notification menu. Was it removed by one of the recent updates?
It’s like it was intended to make it really really hard to reach to our own messages.

We had like 2 ways to get to our private messages. 2 were in the notification menu:

  • Clicking the message icon twice.
  • Clicking our username in the notification menu and then Messages.

Both of these options are gone. Like, that was done on purpose.

Now, there is almost no direct way. We do need to view one of the new messages we receive (From the notification menu), and then click on the message icon on the message title.

That’s one way.

The other, is writing the URL to our messages manually in the browser.

This is no good UX if you asked me; unless you guys have a reason behind doing this.

Can you please explain?

Another thing:
Would it be hard to design the “Add New Member” to a private message to accept more than one entry in the same step? Like adding multiple names, then clicking invite instead of inviting members on at a time?

Thanks

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As far as I know, messages can still be accessed by double clicking the message icon.

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Private messages aren’t hidden by any recent change, it’s likely to be a theme or component doing this to your site.

Check using safe mode:

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This is a picture of the Notification menu where it shows no message icon or message button:

P.S: It’s in safe mode too.

Imgur

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Just noticed why it’s removed…

I’ve disabled this option from settings:
“Allow trust level 1 (configurable via min trust level to send messages) users to create messages and reply to messages. Note that staff can always send messages no matter what.”

I thought it would stop everyone from sending out messages and it won’t affect staff members.

I’m an Admin (Trust Level 4) and when this option is disabled, I don’t get the message icon nor the button as shown in the above picture.

Is that normal?

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Yeah, we should show the icon for staff regardless of what the setting is set to.

We’ll get it fixed, thanks for reporting the issue :+1:

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Hello Joe

I was actually getting questions from members as well on how they can reach their private messages. The members should be able to receive messages I believe (from staff or other groups) and they should have the messages icon as well, no?

I could find my way to the private messages (through the different methods mentioned above) but my main pain point was answering members on how they can reach their messages.

Thanks for your support and attention

Best

9

Through the notification they get for it is the primary way.

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It will be pretty hard to get to old, read messages if they don’t have the message icon.

We do get to messages for re-reading old messages a lot.

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You have a very specific use-case. There’s no point showing the icon if the user has no messages - or if they’re not allowed to send any per the setting discussed above. It’s also a bit expensive to check if the user has messages and display the button based on that. We’ll fix the issue where the button is not displayed for staff, but we won’t show the icon unconditionally.

For your use-case, you need to customize your theme. You can add this to the header section of your theme if you want your users to have the icon as well.

<script type="text/discourse-plugin"
        version="0.8">
  api.addUserMenuGlyph(widget => {
   if (!widget.currentUser || widget.currentUser.staff) return

    const glyph = {
     action: "quickAccess",
     actionParam: "messages",
     label: "user.private_messages",
     className: "user-pms-link",
     icon: "envelope",
     href: `${widget.attrs.path}/messages`
    };
    return glyph;
});
</script>

This will show the icon to the users even if that setting is not ticked - but it excludes staff members so that you don’t get two icons for the same thing once we push the fix I talked about earlier.

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We’ll now show the icon to staff even if that setting is used.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/8360

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Thank you.

About the 2nd suggestion, is it possible to be done? It would make our lives much easier and save us a lot of time.

Would it be hard to design the “Add New Member” to a private message to accept more than one entry in the same step? Like adding multiple names, then clicking invite instead of inviting members one at a time?

Thanks

1 Like
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