I think a formal method within the system would be helpful. That is, to me, a failing Somewhere Else - there is really no easy way to communicate with someone because email addresses are not (unless specifically listed in user profiles) public. Sometimes what I have done is: Find a message (Q, A, comment) from that user and respond to it. But that is less than ideal for a bunch of reasons, most notably that it is public. Which leaves the general answer: Chat. For now for the primary Codidact instance that means Discord. But not everyone is on Discord, and the solution to that is to implement our own Chat, which would solve a number of issues. But that is non-trivial, so it will take some time until that happens.

In the same way that not everyone is on Discord, there may be people who do not want to be on our own chat system.

I'd like to see us implement a chat system, and remove the dependency on Discord, but I would still want it to be opt in. Not everyone who wants to participate in Q&A wants to be contactable for reasons unrelated to their specific question or answer.

I recall SE chat only allowing pinging a user if they have been active in a recent period of time. If implementing it here, I'd prefer to have a user not contactable until they choose to opt in to chat, but then continue to be contactable indefinitely until they choose to opt out.

It might help to also have more fine grained options: do I want to be contactable only in rooms I have already participated, or from any room?

In particular, we could let a user choose whether to be contactable by direct message, or only in public messages.

Direct messages create an additional moderation burden though, so I would want us to consider only allowing direct messages to moderators, with all other communication being public.