URLs for message to group no longer work

[fefrei (Felix Freiberger)]

There’s a feature where you can create URLs to pre-compose a message to a user or a group, like this:

• for users: https://discourse/new-message?username=fefrei
• for groups: https://discourse/new-message?groupname=Team

The user links still work, but the group links no longer work in Discourse 1.9.0.beta10. They silently redirect to the main URL, but neither a composer not an error message appear.

Original report here:

Private messages to a group, or other means to handle private support requests

I can’t get this to work anymore. It works just fine with the username-feature, but i can’t get it to work with the groupname-feature.

[tobiaseigen]

confirmed on my site. group is set so everyone can message it.

[fefrei (Felix Freiberger)]

Thanks!
(Even if messaging were not allowed, an error message should appear. This was also working previously.)

[yeonsh (Yeon Seunghoon)]

We have same issue. When I tried to send private message to a group using URL I got:

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Perhaps @gerhard can have a quick look.

[gerhard (Gerhard Schlager)]

Ok, this is fixed:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/a5408650bd693bf643c8d9d976ca56a338f9ca24

While testing I noticed that the autocomplete in the composer for new messages doesn’t show groups unless they are mentionable. That’s probably a sideeffect of Split into two settings: "Who can message and @mention this group?" - #5 by nbianca