Monica Cellio‭ Please, consider changing the one-limit "ping" according to user privileges (maybe making a new privilege based on some other privileges and reps). High rep/privilege users that do janitorial work may have the need to ping mods more often, especially until some more tools for maintaining the sites are available.

Lorenzo Donati‭ my thought is that you could have one discussion with mods "open" at a time, and it stays open until somebody explicitly closes it. This would allow a long-running channel if that's easier for the people involved. If I recall correctly (I don't have that branch set up at the moment), new messages in an existing private discussion will produce notifications -- mods need to know when users they've initiated conversations with respond, too. I'll need to check what "clustering" we're doing on those pings.

Monica Cellio‭ Well, if that's a sort of semi-permanent two-way comm channel between a user and a mod, that's fine. I was worried the mechanism was just a sort of "flag message".

Clustering may not be so important if the messages can be given a sticky title: the title remains in effect until changed, so the flows of messages can be parsed more smoothly even if it is purely sequential. At a later time you could implement sort of "conversations" and old messages could be split into conversations using their title to determine grouping. Just an idea off the top of my head. Not particularly well thought out, admittedly.

Thanks for these suggestions. Yes, the idea is to allow conversations, not just single messages. It started with mod messages: moderators can send warnings (or suspension messages) now, but they're one-shot and there's no easy way to respond and discuss. We want to fix that. And in fixing that, we would have most of the tooling in place to go the other direction too; we'll just need to figure out if it's an "everybody" thing or behind an ability check of some sort, and then create some UI.

Monica Cellio‭ I don't think everybody should have the ability to have this level of access to mods. It would be too prone to abuse. I think a new privilege is warranted. However, I see some merit to enable some sort of "mod pinging" for every user. I can't say, however, how you could enforce stricter limits for unprivileged users with the tools you're currently building.

BTW, I would also welcome a way to ping any user, maybe privately. Even just to say "hey here is my email address" (e.g. for some work related stuff, perhaps someone wants to offer a job or request consulting, or even something less formal). Of course that should be an opt-in for any user. I realize it is just a lot of work to implement in a smart way, without turning the platform into "worse twitter", though.