DMs are in an envelope in the pulldown from my profile on another Discourse site I’m on, and I seem to recall it working that way here at some point a while ago. But I don’t currently see an envelope in my pulldown Did this functionality get moved, or disabled, or … ?
I think it is disabled. It is a forum admin setting.
Whether or not it is a good thing to have DM facilities I do not know. This is something to think hard about for the new community direction (I’d be inclined to say no, keep the channel a pure “public discussion forum” tool, and DM channels are elsewhere e.g. fedi or matrix etc.). I think (not sure) that DM access might be made dependent on member access level. That way you might assure that only long-time active more trusted members gain such privilege.
Maybe only DM’s to staff should be allowed to be DM’ed, so members can make inquiries about forum/community-related matters that require a level of privacy. Note that in flag-handling of Discourse there are DM facilities linked to that in the UI, so there it is handled.
I should add that turning off DM’s meant I suddenly lost access to posts I’d made.
Another form of access loss to one’s own communication is when a forum staff member steps down and staff access is revoked. This happened to me, where I can no longer point to evidence on how past well-being incidents were handled (though I made local copies). You also have no longer control on how that information lives on there. GDPR gives a number of rights there, which require thinking about.
There’s been one “super incident” re:well-being at SocialHub that took an incredible amount of caring, spending time and energy during months. Not only are there still lessons-learned to be drawn from that in a Well-being retrospective, but potentially the incident still rears up, as the root cause still exists today.
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