I need to show the name of the recipient of a personal message in the personal messages list.
If your pm didn’t have a reply from the recipient yet it will only show the sender as the last participant.
This confuses most of my members because they send several mostly identical messages with the same subject and would need to open each message to see which member they sent it to.
Those messages are private so multiple recipients won’t do.
An example would be managing secret santas. Each member gets a message containing different mailing addresses, but they shouldn’t know who is the secret santa of whom. All messages are titled “Your secret santa”.
Is it possible to get a single recipient and then display it? Plugin or theme edit maybe?
3 Likes
I’ve heard this before (there may be a topic on meta about it already) and I am sympathetic. Not sure how hard it will be to do, as this behavior should be quite specific to PMs.
Can you evaluate the difficulty of doing this @vinothkannans in the context of a person’s PM “topic list” page only?
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I think it’s not a difficult one. Currently we only displaying the participants in the PM topic list. If participants count is less than 5 then we can add allowed_users and/or allowed_groups into the list. So the recipient’s avatar will be displayed even if they’re not replied. In this case we don’t need any major UX change.
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OK if it is low risk, make the change, but be sure it is specific to PM topic list please 
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It’s done. Now the recipient’s avatar will be included in the PM list even if they not yet participated.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/2d6aa2aea2b04a5a0aab16187737e444364ad12e
P.S. Also did some cleanup to remove unused codes.
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Thank you!
I think the mobile view still shows only the username of the sender when there was no reply. (Sent messages list). Since there is only space for one username, would it be possible to just show the first recipient?
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Sure, I will improve it too. Added to my list 
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