I’ve found myself wanting to find logs of the communication with users regarding their silencing and/or suspension. While an email is sent to the offending user with the reason (I think?) I’m not able to see this message in the system (as far as I can see). Even the email logs don’t show the message itself. Further, if the user used a disposable email address, they might never get the message.
It’d be great if Discourse would just use a direct message akin to an “official warning” instead of (or perhaps in addition to) the direct and unobservable email.
Yes, I’m aware the reason is stored in the DB, and that you can access it manually. But that’s not necessarily the message the user received.
This has been noted as a cause for confusion in the past, — and I think this feature request would help address that confusion.
No, these messages do not appear there. Or in any group inbox as far as I can find. Nor in the target user’s inbox. Could there be a site setting that affects this? I looked but couldn’t find one.
There is a private message sent to the user from @system, but it simply states “Your account is temporarily on hold” without any explanation. Its text comes from system_messages.silenced_by_staff.text_body_template, which doesn’t have access to the reason placeholder. The default text is very soft and plain wrong when used as an intentional timeout: “placed on hold as a precautionary measure”
There is a log of the sent email that has the text I’m after, but it doesn’t include the content.
The name of the slug that contains the text I want with the silenced_til and reason interpolation keys is user_notifications.account_silenced.text_body_template — which made me think to look in the user notifications, but it also doesn’t appear there.
Have you looked in the Logs section? If you go to Logs > Staff Actions > and set the Filter to Silence User, it’ll give you something like this. You can click Show in the Details column to see the message.
Ah, that’s good to know, too, but it doesn’t address my main concern here, which is making the record of the user notification more visible to both the users themselves and the mods.
None of these artifacts (the email log, staff action log, or direct DB query) actually show what was sent to the user. It’s very opaque — to both mods and users.
Using a PM for this notification has several significant advantages:
Visibility on the platform for both users and mods
Admins can see the “read receipts” in the form of the topic views
It should replace the generic “account on hold as a precautionary measure” PM that is more appropriate for automated system actions than it is for a staff reprimand.
I agree that automated message is a little odd to be sent when an account is silenced as a staff action, because it reads that account is only on hold until a staff review.
Edit: Could be set as that because silencing can be an automated action as well as manually done by mod/admin. Then user account that has been silenced can still talk in PM topics but just can’t start new ones or public topics.
With suspension PMs wouldn’t make sense because user can’t even login to read those, so e-mail would be the only way to communicate.
It’s not unreasonable to think that such moderator- or system-level PMs could/would be able to supersede the standard PM email-notification setting. Private messages can even be explicitly addressed and sent to raw email addresses.
The last time I tried to send a personal message to an email address while default email messages level was set to “never”, a staged user was created but no email was sent
May be that could be possible, that setting can be changed manually by admin also. That can work to send e-mail with PM to a suspended user but they can’t reply directly while suspended the system will reject if they reply by e-mail.
Wouldn’t this be only if there is already a staged user that has e-mail sending settings? If you are sending an e-mail to an address not registered that creates a new account invitation link.
There are logs of the suspension reason e-mail messages in the staff action logs, have you seen those?:
You may be looking at slightly different logs that what I can see in the admin panel which does show the e-mail message sent to the user, also e-mail sender logs have that.
However this is still good feature request to have those messages in PM so the user has that record and is easier for admin/mod to see would be good.
