Hello moderators,
Do you still believe that it’s a bad thing to have a PM system?
I am asking because the old community had at least the ability to reply to a message and to make that reply visible only to OP or OP and moderators or only moderators, etc.
Reading the “Discourse” platform features, it seems that it offers a fully functional PM system.
And, in that system, if someone becomes too annoying for another one, it can be marked as such and the system blocks his/her messages.
Thanks!
You raise a good point.
I can only give you my own, personal, view and reassure you that no decision about the new platform is taken lightly, without considering the bigger picture, nor that anything is cast in stone.
This is very much a work in progress.
Yes, answerhub allowed “private” replies, but it also had a completely different, tiered, response structure.
Discourse has a flat structure, so that doesn’t really fit and there aren’t plugins (that I am aware of) which could enable that functionality.
You are correct that discourse has full-featured direct messaging. Consensus, at this point of the rollout, is that it will not be enabled for everyone.
It will be restricted to moderators and admins, so that email privacy can be enforced, but critical support and moderation conversations can take place.
The controls around message flows are limited which makes opening it broadly a little challenging.
In any case, a topic like this is important so that the broader community has an opportunity to comment, so thank you for raising this.
There are very few “regressions” on the new vs old community, and hopefully the pros outweigh the cons.
But again, please bear with us as the transition occurs and and the platform matures.
Thanks for allowing opinions on this.
No offense, but in the old community the moderation team pushed this a little bit to extreme, by not even allowing an user to share his/her email in a message.
Why not, as long as if one does it, will assume all things that will follow when exposing his/her email address publicly and any inconveniences that could occur with crawl bots that collect email addresses and then fill their inbox with “enlarging” advertising messages.
Nowadays it’s free to have an email address and I, for one, have a main/personal email address that I am sharing very carefully to only certain persons and another one(s) used for different publicly purposes.
I am sure that many wanted to chat more informally and build relationships with other users, without cluttering community pages.
I hear you.
The challenge with personal information, is the provider immediately inherits a responsibility when it is recorded on their site, so it is, unfortunately a little complicated.
No one, intentionally, wants to stifle collaboration. Far from it.
Hopefully Guy has some ideas how to unlock this on the new platform. The intent is to make this a much better experience.
Hi @alexpescaru
Private messaging has definitely been considered as part of this roll out.
The door is not closed forever, but it has begun in the most restricted state, for now admins and moderators can start a private message conversation with everyone, and those people can reply but nothing else yet.
There are many levels of ‘permissions’ for the site, and I can see the potential for private messages between users becoming a ‘privilege’ once a user is established as a genuine member of the community in good standing.
There are a few concerns I have with the ability to create new private messages enabled by default for everyone.
Spam - which is a huge issue on the old community site. This was one of the catalysts for why we moved, it was a massive, relentless and mostly thankless job to keep the old site spam free, and the tools weren’t very good. Private messages are another vector for spam, and harder to control than public messages.
People trying to escalate their individual issues by badgering others, especially Victron employees. We are lucky to have quite a few Victron employees who visit the site to learn about issues and get feedback. This is not something we can take for granted though, If those people begin to get distracted by 1:1 conversations then it’s likely we will lose that and everyone is then worse off. So I am very careful to make sure that their time is treated with respect. It’s the same reason that we have a guideline around @ mentions of Victron staff, but at least then it’s in public and we can moderate it.
It’s nice the feature exists, and I am pretty sure we will look into expanding access to it again over time, but for now I am happy to roll out with as few moving parts as possible.
Why not do the above quoted and also allow horizontal messaging between users, restricting the users to do vertical messaging towards privileged users? This will also solve issue no.2.
As for issue no.1, the spam in private messages is the user job, not the moderation team job. You have “block user feature”, from what I am remembering, until the spammer is blocked or banned at community level.