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staion I'm still having some difficulty wrapping my head around your distinction between Private Messaging and Private Discussion. Can you elaborate or clarify a bit more? Thanks.

My understanding is as follows:

Private Messages
Personally, I see what is being developed here as a Private Messaging feature. It is allowing me to select specific recipients (as I would do so in other messaging services or in email) and post a message, beginning a conversation with only them.

Private Discussions
I currently run a Flarum instance for a small team and have configured certain tags and permissions so that a number of different private discussion spaces exist on the forum. Only users with specific roles are granted access to those private discussions.

      UaMV as I explained earlier, these are functionally the same as private discussions except for the recipients involved. In this extension, you can open private discussions with specified individuals without requiring special permissions.

        Sorry, lost interest...just name them as you all wish...they are the same. I just though these are suppose to be private forums (threads) not PMs as normal forums have, since Flarum is not a normal forum software...let devs be creative ?

        Will all participants be notified via email when a post is created? For me, that would make private messaging/private discussion one in the same.

        If not, then it's just a private (mini) forum they sill have to come check on their own.

          JRay to me it makes most sense to add both create and reply events to the list in your settings page, what do you think?

          As to permission, I'll be adding at least one, to indicate whether you have the permission to create private discussions at all. Once I've implemented groups to be recipients, I'll be adding another permission; not sure how or what yet.

              luceos That makes sense as long as admins (or the default) can enable for all users. I would not depend on individuals going into settings and turning on notifications. From there, they could turn off if they choose.

              Also would be great as you said for admins to be able to turn off individual users ability to PM. While it's a small scale, there certainly is the ability for abuse by certain folks (and I've seen that in the past).

                @staion It's just a name don't make it a big deal. As long as it's does what it is designed to do, you'll be fine.

                I was just checking if I'm annoying...guess I am...

                I've decided to pick a name that suits the purpose of the extension whilst also giving a friendly nod towards @Dominion who I've come to respect immensely. The extension is given an Eastern name: "Byōbu" after the Japanese privacy screens one would place in the room to keep curious eyes out.

                  Ok so package was renamed, icon was changed. Next up is adding some stuff to admin, like permissions. This would then need modifications in the frontend as well.

                  Feel free to test the current work-in-progress version in your non-production environment using:

                  composer require flagrow/byobu:dev-master

                  Please note, stuff can (or probably most commonly will) be broken from time to time, so do not use in production.

                    I know I haven't commented yet @luceos, but this is going to be an amazing extension and hopefully comes out of the box with Flarum. Private discussions are a necessity for any forum!

                      Prosperous thanks for your support.

                      I'm very happy how this extension is coming together, again I've learned quite a deal about Flarum internals again even though I'm still running into a few issues before this can go into a beta version.

                        @luceos a suggestion if I may...

                        Add some way to start a PM (or byobu) by clicking on a member within the context of a post. Maybe a link/icon on their profile modal that comes up when you mouse over their avatar?

                        Many times users will be reading a thread and want to send someone a note right there. By clicking on "Private message" or an icon, the intended user would be pre-populated in recipients. That would be sweet and also help with usability.