Our use case for wanting to PM an entire group was requested via twitter:
As an admin, I want to be able to message entire groups, specifically b/c we’re using Discourse as a learning forum (e.g. for MOOCs, online synchronous learning experiences, to support open teaching and learning communities, etc).
Reasoning for PMs - Would like to be able to encourage lurkers, congratulate higher trust levels and, of course, mass issue badges when a certain trust level has been reached or upon course completion (i don’t mean Discourse badges, but rather open badges - AKAIK the discourse badges are super beta, you might consider implementing OBI b/c in edtech there are a lot of people excited about Discourse, and they’re badging their learners).
I didn’t realize you could use groups as an alias until this thread (thanks!). I’ve tried it out and found a little bug. It seems that when you use a group alias, if you have more than ca 10 people in the group and you put in the recipients first, it confiscates the “title” field. Then you can’t post without a title. UI bug. (I’m using FF20)