When we set min trust to send messages and min trust to flag posts to tl1, new users no longer have access to administrators and must open new topics for all their requests.
It is better that all users can always send private messages to staff and users with any level of trust level can flag their posts.
https://github.com/pfaffman/discourse-allow-pm-to-staff
Can you not change that with the setting you mentioned? Tl0 users are not… Trusted. It doesn’t take much to get to trust level 1.
Thanks for the plugin, I will check and install it soon.
I mentioned tl1 above for example. In fact, we set min trust to send messages to tl1 and min trust to flag posts to tl2 due to the high volume of spam of new users. But a lot of our work in the community is done through flags. We always tell users to use the flag if you want your posts to be reviewed or deleted, or your topic category changed. On the other hand, because we can not leave the flag feature open to all users, there is a bit of confusion.
If it is possible for all users to flag their posts for review by admins and set min trust to flag posts to work only for other posts, it will be easier to handle requests.
I now remember that I had already mentioned this [here], sorry.
Today I realized that when it is possible to send a message to a group, any user with any level of trust can send a message to that group. In this case, min trust to send messages is ignored.
Is this a bug or feature?
If it is a feature, we can use it instead of a plugin.
The group settings allow you to control who can message the group.
Yes, we use that group setting. But I thought min trust to send messages should rewrite that setting. If ignoring min trust to send messages in groups is not a bug, it can be used as a feature.
We need to restrict private messaging to tl0 and tl1 so that they can only send messages to administrators. With this feature, we can do this easily through groups.
Is it possible to lose this feature in future updates?
Thanks Jay for this link. Can you confirm or deny if it still works?
I have a client who uses it. He hasn’t complained. That’s pretty good evidence that it works. Please let know know if your find otherwise.
Still works great! Thanks a ton.
Please keep this plugin active, and if there’s any way to get it merged into Discourse core it would be better still. This is a bare essential function in my experience with administering forums.
Hi there @pfaffman , it looks like the recent updates to GitHub - pfaffman/discourse-allow-pm-to-staff: Allow private messages to be sent to staff for users who could otherwise not send private messages. have broken sending PMs between normal users. Specifically, normal users can respond to already existing PM topics but not create new PM topics. This is the error:
I didn’t really understand the function of the allow_pm_allowed_pm_groups setting, but I tried setting it to staff,trust_level_0,trust_level_1,trust_level_2 but the problem persisted. I disabled the plugin and PMs are now working normally again.
Darn.
Thanks for letting me know.
The client I wrote it for doesn’t allow pms between users, so I neglected to test that case.
I’ll try to get it fixed soon. If you have a budget, it could happen sooner.
Hi there, appreciate the reply! No worries, I can just leave it disabled for now, or if needed I can temporarily fork it from the old version for now.
Have you considered trying to submit this as a PR to the upstream Discourse app to share the maintenance burden? It’s really quite a major limitation of Discourse that admins have to chose between allowing PMs for untrusted user groups (really bad idea, I had a major PM spam attack on a non-Discourse forum) or else not allow new users to contact staff. I’ve handled tons of (public) questions already in the short time since migrating to Discourse from new users that were trying to contact me and couldn’t.
I developed the plugin 6 years ago. There has been no interest expressed, though I haven’t asked explicitly.
I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been more interest in such a feature, but it’s only been in recent weeks that I’ve noticed anyone else using it, perhaps because it worked before now.
Hi again Jay, I see some new commits today for the plugin. Would it be worth giving it another try? Do I need to configure any settings to simply make it so that all users with an active account can contact me as the admin?
