You can now send a PM to an email address, even if the user does not exist on your site! Email addresses sent to in this way will become staged users, and will have full access to their PM history if they sign up for the site.
28 个赞
But only if they have staged users enabled in the admin site settings.
I love this feature and look forward to using it.
5 个赞
Yes! This is awesome. As a result of it I have started using Discourse with the Assigned plugin to manage my client todo list. Thanks, @nbianca!
5 个赞
Sorry if this should be obvious, but I don’t seem to grasp the magnificence of this new feature. Could you say a few words about how exactly you are using it?
@pfaffman is probably talking about the whole package involving personal messages, staged users and assigned plugin. This particular topic talks about a feature that adds some magic to that by letting you send a PM to someone by email even if they are not yet signed up. It creates a staged user with that email address and they will then have full access to the PM history if they sign up later. That’s pretty cool.
1 个赞
Yes, but what can you do with it? Do you have a use case?
I guess it means you can include anybody in a personal conversation on your forum? But will they subsequently receive all replies in that private topic?
I now found this:
but I’m still trying to grasp how it works in practice. Because if you are one person who wants to contact another person who is not a member, you might as well just send them an email, no? So the advantage is that (a) you can include the non-member in a conversation among several non-members (right?) and (b) even if it’s just yourself and the other, the advantage is that you are pulling them into the forum?
Sure - what you’re describing is possible. They will indeed get an email for all replies in that private topic. They can participate fully by email. If and when they join up later they will see the full history there in their messages. If they cc other people in a reply, it also creates staged users for them or includes them if they already exist.
For me, the opportunity is more in the ability to use discourse messages as a support portal or CRM. You just set up a discourse group with an email address and use that group to field inquiries and to manage them. With this feature you can also start the conversation yourself via discourse PM, without having to go to email. Because it’s all in discourse, you can work with your team to delegate who follows up etc etc. I believe the discourse @team group works this way now.
I don’t use it this way yet because there are still some quirks to messages (and group messages in particular) that I’d like to see resolved first. Also, PM tagging is on the roadmap and when that happens will make it easier to manage messages.
Another very real concern and reason to be careful with starting emails via PM is that the email looks like a discourse notification, and uses the discourse FROM email address for matching replies. For people not already signed up this will be unfamiliar, disconcerting and likely unwelcome.
There’s alot of magic here and it’s very exciting - but more testing by more people is going to be needed to work out the kinks and make sure it all works in a predictable way for everyone involved. So it’s good you’re raising these questions. I hope you also go test. 
3 个赞
Yes, that was one of the uses I had in mind. Or rather, a specific variation of “customer management”: management of conference/workshop participants (in an academic context, but I guess it can be applied to any conference). My experience is that at the end of a workshop or smaller conference, there is often an urge to “keep in touch” and perhaps someone sets up an email list, or a group on Facebook or LinkedIn. So my idea was to setup that communication platform already before the conference even takes place and use it to communicate with participants (program updates, accomodation and transport tips, menu options and what not).
One of the many advantages of that is that if someone signs up late(r) all the information sent out previously is still there for them to go through (which doesn’t mean that people will look at it, though). Another is obviously that the organizing team can jointly handle those communications and incoming queries.
So that’s what I did earlier this year. I set up a discourse forum for my conference participants (or, if you wish: I organized a conference to start off my discourse forum 
). The problem is (was?), that I had to ask all participants to join the forum (or rather: to accept my invitation) and several people did not understand that, ignored it or forgot about it. So I had to remind them and I actually lost one participant who simply refused to sign up. 
So this new feature might help address that challenge, although it would mean that the communications would have to be limited to a single private topic (right?) and if someone replies to a message, everyone will get the reply (right?), which is precisely the kind of thing I was trying to avoid by using discourse (I used a restricted category with all participants were watching_first_post).
Another use case that just came to my mind was this: does this feature mean that I can basically use my (any!) discourse forum as my email client? In some email conversations I really miss discourse’s quoting feature… By using discourse PMs, my interlocutor will probably still use ordinary email, but at least I can quote with ease. 
But you are right with this, of course:
4 个赞
Interesting. When that user signs up, do they count as invited users?
2 个赞
They do not, no. There’s no way to directly correlate a staged user receiving an email and a signup.
3 个赞
That is an interesting idea though cc @sam
4 个赞
I am not against treating staged users like this as implicitly invited.
@techAPJ is working on the invite system, maybe he can investigate how complex this would be after he is done with the current round of changes.
7 个赞
我尝试创建一个链接的新主题，但它显示“您无权查看该资源”，不确定原因，所以我将把它放在下面。
我很高兴能使用此功能，这样我（作为管理员）就可以邀请不同的人参与讨论，同时我也有些担心，如果网站上的每个人都可以邀请他们想要的任何人，那么我将很难维持我想要的半封闭社区。我担心这会允许任何人参与社区（或至少是社区内的私信），并覆盖我为此设定的控制。
有没有办法为不同的群组启用/禁用此功能？例如，只允许管理员或员工向电子邮件地址发送私信？
2 个赞
您的网站有哪些设置可以保护您的网站隐私？您是否开启了用户批准？恐怕我们需要了解更多关于您网站设置的详细信息。
2 个赞
（啊，我注意到你在我写这个的时候自己发现了这一点，但我还是会发出来）
我一直对利用“暂存用户”来吸引那些永远不会登录但会回复电子邮件的人的潜力很着迷。例如，在人权和国际发展领域，有许多思想领袖对学习新平台不感兴趣，或者太忙而无法登录所有地方，或者无法阅读和回复来自许多论坛的电子邮件摘要。最后我放弃了，并得出结论，不值得太努力地尝试，因为它绕过了话语软件平台背后许多的意图，它是一个不受支持的解决方法，并且可能导致一些意想不到的结果。
最好使用邀请系统，它是受支持的，并且提供了相当强大的功能，可以邀请人们并授予他们对安全类别的访问权限，并将他们直接引导到您希望他们参与的主题。为被邀请者设置完整的帐户既快速又简单，让他们能够通过平台更全面地直接参与。
话虽如此，您可以使用 min trust to send email messages 来限制谁可以发送电子邮件。将其设置为 4（这是默认值），然后不要将此信任级别授予除您信任可以向电子邮件地址发送私人消息和创建暂存用户之外的任何人。TL4 几乎具有版主级别的权限，所以任何拥有 TL4 的人都应该是您网站上高度信任的成员。
还有一个 allow changing staged user tracking 管理员设置，据称允许您作为管理员管理暂存用户的通知偏好设置。我还没有尝试过，但如果这能按广告宣传的那样工作，那么您可以通过向他们的电子邮件地址发送私人消息来创建他们的暂存帐户，然后编辑暂存用户的通知，以便他们可以关注您希望他们接收电子邮件并能够回复的类别或标签。然后，您可以通过设置类别电子邮件地址并将其提供给他们来允许暂存用户创建新主题。
3 个赞
啊，是的，我已经找到了其中一个选项，但另一个还没有找到，所以我很感谢你指出来。我也很感谢你对电子邮件参与与全面社区参与的看法，因为我想象中，许多可能想与我建立的社区互动的人，或者我想让他们与之互动的人，可能会不愿加入一个新平台。所以我很高兴听到你在这方面的经验。
谢谢！
2 个赞