Re: Restrict Topic Replies to Topic Owner only

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The discussion revolves around restricting topic replies to the topic owner only when interacting with a Discourse forum via email. jeff_y suggests an option to make “reply” send a private message to the person being replied to, and “reply-all” add the post to the topic, following email conventions.

A user had complained about receiving too much email after their “private” complaint was emailed to the entire forum. Jonathan5 proposes adding a disclaimer to the email, while jeff_y considers implementing this idea.

pfaffman suggests adding the user’s actual email address to the message or including a button to compose a private message in a web browser. jeff_y notes that the community recently migrated from a 1990s-era mailing list and agrees that Discourse should follow email conventions when interacting via email.

The discussion is related to another topic on Discourse Meta, https://meta.discourse.org/t/allow-reply-to-individual-instead-of-topic-forum-mailing-list-feature/44905, which jeff_y has not yet tried to address the issue.

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I’m continuing the discussion at Restrict Topic Replies to Topic Owner only .

The following is only about interacting with a Discourse forum via email.

Email and forums have different conventions. When someone replies to an email, they expect it to go just to the person being replied to. When someone replies-all to an email, they expect it to go to the whole forum / mailing list.

I’d really like to see the option where an email “reply” just sends a private message to the person being replied to, whereas “reply-all” adds the post to the topic.

Some context: a user wrote to me about getting too much email. They were pretty angry when their “private” complaint got emailed to the entire forum / mailing list.

Changing email subject line should start a new topic
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As a temporary measure you could add to the message “Visit Topic or reply to this email to respond” the words “to the whole forum” :slight_smile:

Can the email format be changed much? Could you put a prominent button in the email eg “PM this user”?

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Those are good ideas to implement in the meanwhile. I’ll look into them!

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For one community I wrote a plugin that adds the user’s actual email address to the message so that they can email them directly. Since your users seem to want a 1990s era mailing list, that might be what you want to do.

I think that it’s also possible to include a button that will let them compose a PM in a web browser.

EDIT: but maybe this is what you want:

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Thanks for the suggestion.

Yes, we’ve recently migrated from a mailing list from the 1990s. Ironically, the previous mailing list also had “reply” go to the entire mailing list, so they are requesting a change in behavior.

Users can have some peculiar requests. In this case, I agree with the user that Discourse should follow email conventions when interacting via email. I made a similar feature request to Discourse Meta for stripping “Fwd:” when creating a topic based on a forwarded message: users won’t - and shouldn’t have to - break email convention when forwarding an email to the forum.

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FYI, in the OP, I said the post was continued from another post, but that other post was for an unrelated issue.

This topic is related to Allow reply-to individual instead of topic/forum (mailing list feature). I haven’t yet tried the plugin the user provided to address the issue.

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