We’ve disabled personal messages because we don’t want users to be able to message each other individually. However, I think it could be valuable to make mentioning and messaging groups to still be available. For example, let’s say we create a group for all attendees of a particular event. We’d want to be able to message each other before and during the event + notify everyone by default when a message is sent, but then the event ends and it’s no longer needed so having a private category seems like it might not be the best fit.
Interesting use case, but I can’t think of a workaround solution.
If personal messages are disabled globally, then that includes personal messages in groups. I just tested it in my site, it’s a bit confusing because you still have the “Message” button available in the group page, but you will get an error when trying to send the message.
I think you will have to create a private category for the group, and then delete it once the event has finished.
5 Likes
I’m going to move this topic to the #feature category. I think it should be possible for users who do not have permission to send PMs to other users to still be able to message a group.
My reasoning for this is that the easiest way to setup a support system on Discourse is to create a custom group to answer support requests, then allow users to send PMs to the group. Currently this functionality depends on having the enable personal messages setting enabled. Even with that setting enabled, only users who meet the min trust to send messages setting requirement will be able to send messages on-site to the group. I don’t think that setting up this type of support system should be dependant on allowing users to send PMs to other users.
One possible way of dealing with this would be to add a min trust to message group site setting. That way regular PMs could be disabled for regular users by setting the min trust to send messages setting to Staff (or 4:leader), but all users on the site could be allowed to message the support system by setting the min trust to message group setting to 0: new user.
12 Likes
It really sounds reasonable!
1 Like
After giving this some more thought, I’m not sure that a new site setting would be required. Instead, the group’s “Who can message this group” setting could be respected and the values of the enable personal messages and min trust to send messages site settings could be ignored for sending messages to a group. Possibly some more options could be added to the “Who can message this group” setting on the group’s page. For example, messaging a particular group could be limited by trust level.
Somewhat related to this topic, in some ways the enable personal messages setting seems to be redundant. If a “staff” option was added to the min trust to send messages setting, there might not be a need for the enable personal messages setting.
4 Likes
The ‘something else’ flags can be sent to moderators even when pm is disabled - is it possible to add extra optional groups to that whitelist?
I really like this idea of having the who can message this group setting be the overriding one.
This makes sense to me!
2 Likes
Wow, I was searching Meta for a discussion on this exact topic - we want to be able to disable PMs between users but to allow users to message our @support team group
Another related issue is users being able to search for other users - given that we don’t want them PM’ing each other we also don’t really want them to be able to look each other up, so would much prefer to have a setting that disabled/able in search too…
1 Like