Has private messaging been disabled on this forum?

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
1

I’ve been a member of this community since 2016 and have used private messaging in the past to communicate with other community members. I can still view my old message history from those conversations. However, I’ve noticed that I no longer see any way to initiate new private messages:

  • No “Message” button appears on user profiles
  • No “New Message” or “Compose” button in the messaging interface
  • I can view my existing message history, but cannot start new conversations

Has private messaging been intentionally disabled for this forum? I know Discourse (the forum software) supports private messaging, so I’m curious whether this is:

  1. A deliberate policy change to keep discussions public and searchable
  2. A permissions issue with my account
  3. Something else I’m missing

I’m asking because I’m setting up my own Discourse forum for educational purposes and trying to understand different approaches to community management. The AppSheet/Google Cloud Community has always been well-run, so I’m interested in learning from the configuration choices here.

Thanks for any clarification!

2

Hi @Kirk_Masden ,
Yes private messaging is currently restricted to only Google staff members.

I had also requested to reinitiate it for us community members. In that post the Google community management team had given their reasons for disallowing the DMs -mainly possible misuse. I had then given some suggestions about for whom DMs can be enabled - members with certain number of days in the community etc.

I will link that post here when I locate it.

3

Thanks! I looked for posts on this topic but, to my surprise, couldn’t find any. I wonder if such discussion was in a section about the forum itself – which seems to have disappeared. :frowning:

4

Hi @Kirk_Masden ,

Here it is:

5

Interestingly, this forum has much tighter restrictions than the Firebase Studio form. There, I can see member profiles and send direct messages. Firebase Studio is also a Google product. So the restrictions we suffer are apparently not Google-wide.

Attn @Andrew_B @Roderick @Michelle @Miqua @cschalk_ws

6

Thanks! I found this:

Limiting DMs was done urging of the legal/privacy teams to limit the potential for spam/abuse in user to user DMs.

For a big company like Google and considering the danger of lawsuits, I guess I can see why this decision was made. Still, DM is important to the “community” aspect of this community so it’s disappointing just the same.

7

I had requested at least a selective permission based on certain criteria such as aging of a community member in the community, her/ his track record in the community and measures such as a practical limit on number of daily , monthly messages, number of recipients allowed in a single DM message.

I believe with software systems, it should be possible to create a logic to allow genuine DMs and keep away noise.

8

In connection with my own Discourse forum, I’ve been relying on a Discourse forum for Discourse forum hosts – appropriately named “Discourse Meta”:

It’s a very large group: 63,410 Members. I think it’s comparable to this forum because Google Developer forums has 231,980 Members which are divided into five communities, of which AppSheet is one. So, the size of the community shouldn’t really prevent messaging. Of course, this decision rests with Google so I won’t push it but before I give up I’d like to say that, if messaging is bad because you can’t monitor what people are doing and saying, the same can be said of Gmail, one of Google’s most popular products. So, I hope a day will come when this will be reconsidered.