In our newly moderated forum, I just got a moderated post which I think is a reply to a private message I sent a user.
Should PM’s be exempt from moderation?
AI-generated summary
A discussion is raised regarding whether direct messages (PMs) should be exempt from moderation. watchmanmonitor shared an issue where a user’s reply to a private message was moderated, despite the sender having a high trust level. codinghorror suggested that the issue might be related to an old version of Discourse, which was later confirmed by watchmanmonitor.
After updating to the latest version, watchmanmonitor was still experiencing the issue, which seemed to be caused by the “approve post count” setting overriding their admin/moderator status. codinghorror suggested that watchmanmonitor should indicate whether they are referring to their hosted instance or a self-hosted instance to avoid confusion.
Mittineague questioned whether the “approve post count” was set to an excessively high value, but codinghorror clarified that it was within valid limits. The issue was eventually fixed by eviltrout, who discovered that replies to PMs were handled differently than creating PMs and made the necessary changes.
I thought @eviltrout changed something around this recently. I can’t remember, though. New users can’t send PMs at all, but they can reply to any PMs they are sent.
ok, in this case no one without TL3 can post w/o it being moderated.
no one is TL3 but for staff.
The user was replying to a direct message I sent him.
I was on Beta 7 +35
I think you are on an old version of Discourse and should update.. I am often unclear if you are talking about your hosted instance with us, or something else. in this case based on the additional version information you provided, this was fixed a while ago.
In the interests of wasting less of your time, and less of ours, I suggest you indicate whether you are referring to your hosted instance or something else on an unknown (to me) version.
I alluded to this in my first rely when I said “I think eviltrout fixed something around this recently”. That is your cue to update to latest 
1 Like
Agreed, I should be up to date, but because many of the changes I need can’t be done in /admin, I’ll have to keep self-hosting for now.
That said, I’ve updated to v1.3.0.beta9-dirty and have repro.
Because I don’t know the best way to enable the feature, I’ve done this:
I suspect it’s the approve post count overriding the fact that I’m admin/moderator
Fair enough, @eviltrout can you have a look?
Also - it was only when replying to the private message I started. I didn’t run into this when creating the PM initially.
Hmmm, is the “approve post count” above the recent “sanity” limits ?
i.e. no more 999999999999999999999
It is nowhere close to the maximum for an integer. Setting a value high is valid.
1 Like
Looks like replies to PMs were handled slightly differently than creating PMs. I’ve fixed it:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/5fdbc6c4b22eab4f06e8d0c6dda1d5b08b94b1c9
3 Likes