Personal messages

jimk · August 17, 2021, 12:38pm

Recently on the new site, someone sent me a personal message because they wanted a further response about a particular answer I had written. This hasn’t been possible on other sites I have used (AskBot, StackExchange) and it felt a bit threatening. Like scam phone calls that you try to block on your phone.

Is there a way to disable personal messages, or maybe to block a particular user? Also if anyone could suggest a case where personal messages are helpful then I would be interested in hearing about it, because it seems like a feature with a lot of potential for abuse and no real benefit that I can see.

Note: I tried to search for a general answer about other sites that use this same engine, but couldn’t remember what the engine is called. The FAQ and pinned messages did not give much information about the site from what I could find.

sophi · August 17, 2021, 12:52pm

Hi, sorry to hear that you feel it threatening, that was not meant.
You can disable personal messages under your profile > Preferences > Notifications.
You can also ignore or mute some users under the same Notifications > Users tab (on the left) and there also allow only some users to send you personal messages.
The site use Discourse, but don’t hesitate to come back to me if you have specific questions. I hope you will enjoy this new site nonetheless.
Cheers
Sophie

jimk · August 17, 2021, 1:03pm

Okay, thanks; disabling personal messages altogether is probably what I will do. It doesn’t look like there is a way to block a specific user from private messages only – if I block them then I won’t see what they post publicly.

Edit: This was intended to be a comment on your answer. Did I do that correctly? It looks kind of like a parallel answer instead.

sophi · August 17, 2021, 1:09pm

On private message, there is no ability to comment, only answers, like in a discussion
From what I understand, if you mute a user, you don’t get the notifications or direct message, but you still see their posts. It’s seems to be the difference between Ignore and Mute (or Silent, my UI is currently in French). I need to research to make sure, but this is how I always understood it.

jimk · August 17, 2021, 1:17pm

Sounds good; it looks like “Muted” may be the answer I am looking for. I’ll mark this as the solution for now and see if it does what I need.

mikekaganski · August 17, 2021, 1:39pm

This seems to be a difference between “question” posts (“default”, or maybe the only possible kind in e.g. English section), that allow comments, and “usual” Discourse threads.

jimk · August 17, 2021, 1:48pm

Makes sense. Even the “question” posts are more like discussions than posts on sites like AskBot. For those of us accustomed to question-based sites, there is a rather large learning curve for Discourse, but hopefully it will get easier with practice. Right now I’m feeling like it is hard to find relevant topics and requires a lot of reading through comments. Of course, I feel that way about the Apache OpenOffice forum as well, which is why I preferred AskLO.

erAck · August 17, 2021, 9:41pm

In user Preferences, either Notifications, Messages, disable Allow other users to send me personal messages; but maybe better keep that enabled and under Notifications → Users enable Only allow specific users to send me personal messages and keep the list empty unless you’re expecting a user to send you a message.