I have moved a couple answers, split topics etc. in my community. I’ve usually felt the need to explain that and thus posted an answer to the modified post or sent a private message to the author.
Sometimes I also didn’t take any action, but wanted to ask the author to do something differently next time.
Mostly this was for education of the community members (e.g. „you can edit your own post instead of writing another answer“).
I don’t want to write these as answers as they are not about the topic. I would like them to be visible to everybody for education purposes so a private message doesn’t work either.
I know there are „team comments“ but my understanding is that these are only visible to other team members?
I‘m imagining something like StackOverflow comments on answers. Does something like this exist? (Built-in or via a plugin)
They are also sometimes about responses to the topic and often about how to write a good response. So then I’m replying to an answer of a user who replied to the actual topic but I’m not talking about the topic, just how this user wrote their answer.
This just distracts from the actual discussion, so I’d rather not have it as an actual reply.
Those are arguably even more visible then answers. This feels to heavy-handed to me. I don’t want to reprimand the user, I often just want to let them know stuff like
btw, I extracted this post to a different topic, because I think it’s better suited to a different discussion. Don’t be afraid to start a new topic and link to existing ones. There is even a „reply as new topic“ function here
Or
you can mention users by using @, this will also insert links to their Profile and is thus preferable to just writing out their name
Most members of my community are new to the concept of a discussion board, many haven’t used any of modern communication tools we are likely all used to (things like Slack, Google Docs, JIRA, etc) and are all new to Discourse and learning it. So I don’t want to tell them „you are doing it wrong“ and make them feel bad, instead I want to help them use the tools they have in a better way and give them a friendly nudge to be better.
That’s why I thought StackOverflow-like comments might work. They are unobstrusive, and clearly about the separate reply, not about the overall topic.
Send them a PM with this info. If you want out of band communication, you need to go out of band. Click or tap the reply arrow in the editor to change reply type to PM.
