[Forum] Private messages

I’ve seen that Discourse gives you option to send private messages to user, but I can’t see it available in our forum. Is it going to be implemented in near future? It would be super useful!

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Probably not. It’s possible and I guess not that difficult to enable, but I saw either Koichi or Viet saying they deliberately disabled it.

But why in the world would they do that?! Sometimes you just want to talk to particular person without hijacking entire topic in forum. Did they give any explanation?

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We can ask the @viet about this, because I wondered as well. I’ve also read the explanation by the team.

Personally I think they deliberately disabled it for the migration phase.

I’ve seen in another thread a theory that perhaps it’s related to trust level. I’m not sure how to raise the trust level though.

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They’ll never trust me. They know I would take the opportunity to slobber all over them.

There’s a few reasons.

First, we don’t want you plotting against us (just kidding).

Second, there’s going to be a time where someone tells us they are being harassed via PM.

Then, because admins have the power to read private messages, we would read your private messages to check on said harassment.

At that point, everyone will realize we have the power to read your dirty nasty private messages, and flip out.

I don’t like the idea of having the power to read anyone’s PMs. Also don’t like the idea of any other admins having the power to read your PMs. So, we’ve simply removed the feature altogether (except, admins can PM you and you can PM them back if they do, so that is one exception).

We did think about making sure it was obvious that we could read your PMs, perhaps in and around the PM area. But, we also know how none of you read the other alerts / warnings we put anywhere at all, so decided this wouldn’t be good enough.

tl;dr we can read your PMs and dealing with the privacy issues around that is too much responsibility and liability.

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Will those of trust level 3 (regulars) still be able to use PMs or did you remove that, too?

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I exchanged some PM’s with @viet on the opening day of the new forum :blush:

Admins are allowed to PM anyone because that’s how we send warnings to bad kids. And if we do PM you, of course you can message back. But that’s it. No one can PM other than admins.

I exchanged some PM’s with @viet on the opening day of the new forum :blush:

Yeah I heard about the lawsuit, bummer

Ah well, I guess i shall just have to continue being dirty and nasty in full view of the public. Right @koichi?
:yum:

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(tune in tomorrow morning when I wake up to 672 reviews)

Is this because you’re playing on the forums too much? :sweat_smile:

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I’m such a simpleminded person, that I didn’t even considered possibility of harassment via PM. I see you point, @koichi, but look how friendly is our community :smiley: Maybe you worry too much? Anyway, thanks for clearing the matter for everyone.

Not only harassement. Imagine there’s a person with considerable knowledge and suddenly everyone writes to him/her for advice. That surely would be troublesome.

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would mean: RIP @BreadstickNinja

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Yes, that knowledge would be better shared with the whole community.