Restrict who you can PM based on Groups

Feature
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Hi Discourse Community!

We’re using groups and categories to restrict what users can see/which forums they can participate in. This is mostly for privacy reasons/so that people aren’t inundated with topics that do not apply to them.

However, we’ve noticed that when you @mention people, or when you private message them, you can actually tag (or reach out to) any user on the platform. With the @mention, you get a warning saying that you’re mentioning someone who doesn’t have access, which is super helpful. However, for private messages, it’s very hard to find the correct person to reach out to. Often people have very similar names/usernames, and we’ve had problems of people messaging the wrong person without realizing it.

We were wondering if you have a solution for this use case. Our idea was to restrict who you can PM, allowing only staff + people in the same groups as you. Is this possible? Is there a different/better work around?

Thank you!

2 Likes
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It’s not at the moment, no.

We’ve had a few requests lately to make groups ‘private’ so that only group members know who is in the group. I think that would make a lot of sense for several use cases.

Your request for limiting PMs to group members would be a natural extension of that. I’m not sure if we’ve actually road mapped this though. @jomaxro can you remember?

4 Likes
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I don’t believe limiting PMs to group members is on the road map at this time. Groups can be private though, simply set Who can see this group? to Group owners, members and admins.

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4

Yeah, I’ve mixed things up a bit here with my words. Sorry about that.
The request I’m thinking of is to make a group visible so that people know it exists, but to hide who is in it.

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For clarification, on our end, we already restrict who can see the group, by using precisely the setting that Joshua mentioned. I don’t think we care about people seeing who is in the group (since we only show groups to members/admins). But it would be vastly helpful to be able to restrict who you can message based on group memberships, because we’ve had a number of messages sent to the wrong person.

Another thing that would help here is being able to have more than 6 people show up in the dropdown so that people can scroll down and find the correct user. Dunno if that’s closer on the roadmap.

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It would indeed be very useful to be able to restrict personal messaging by group.

In fact it would be most useful to be able to restrict PMs to their Primary Group (as set in the User Profile).

1 Like
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Hello everyone,

We have actually solved this problem by raising markteplace request back in Aug '21 which was completed by Michael from Communiteq 🫶🏼 and released as a plugin open-sourced for public to use it.

It’s been several years now, and it works like a charm without maintenance.

I went ahead an posted a new Plugin topic to host & discuss additional information about this function:

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That’s great you have a community-created solution. :raised_hands:

I’ll leave this feature request open so people can still add their voice if it’s something they’d like to see in core. :+1:

I think there has been some ideas floated around making this section of the group settings a ‘group-allowed’ style input in a simailar vein to the recent changes to the admin settings - Changes coming to settings for giving access to features (from trust levels to groups)

group interactions
group interactions603×505 9.77 KB

Though I’m not sure on how probable that change could be, nor on a timeline if it does attract more interest.

1 Like