I love this idea. I think it would be great to see.
I don’t want that user to be punished by affecting his/her flag count but I want to be able to easily give the user an infraction saying please use the heart instead of responding. I’ve gotten stuff like this a few times on other forums from mods with similar things like “post in a different section for that”.
Maybe just have a “minor” flag level for things like this?
I don’t recall from my testing, but does using Notify member_name permit this? I’m thinking that doesn’t actually give them a flag associated to their profile. Only Off-Topic, Inappropriate and Spam actually result in flags accumulating.
The more I think about it and play with it, I believe neither Notify options result in a flag on the user’s account.
You’d have to write a plugin to do that. Personally, we just use an extension called Clipper that we save a lot of “default” messages to and copy and paste it into the PM box.