Have Chats been turned off on purpose?

[jdaviescoates]

I just wanted to message another user but that feature appears to have disappeared

[BrutalBirdie]

Yes has been disabled again, sadly.

There have been bad actors that abused the private chat.
Also, for what ever reason, there is no user account privacy feature, that lets each user decide if they want to enable or disable private chat messages.

[jdaviescoates]

Fair enough.

[robi]

Is it time for an AI co-written plugin to solve this?

[BrutalBirdie]

@robi
If you or someone can? Sure!
But an upstream contrib would be even more awesome.
Since I believe this is a feature everyone should want.

[baris]

it is possible to restrict chats so only users you follow can message you.

[BrutalBirdie]

@baris
But that is not the same tho.
Why should I follow someone, just so that they can chat with me?
If I am not interested in what they normaly post, then I just have to unfollow again later on.
This already feels like a bad UX.

User Story:
As a User of NodeBB, I would like to either fully enable or disable the private chat for me personally or have an allow-list and/or deny-list of users who are allowed/denied to chat with me.
This way I don't have to hijack another feature just for the sake of enabling another.

I hope what I write makes some sense

[baris]

@BrutalBirdie https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13359, I think it makes sense. Will try to get it in for 4.3.0

[BrutalBirdie]

@baris oh!
I did not expect this to get tracktion that fast.
A very welcome supprise
Thanks for your awesome work!