Allow easier composition of private messages

Hi @Scott Baldwin! We have this functionality available already in Control, where you can message up to 50 community users at once. I made a short recording of it. 

On Destination, it was a product choice from the past to not offer the possibility of searching users and messaging multiple users at once, in order to protect the community members from spammers or unwelcomed users who want to exploit members on the community.

Given the current vision of our product and the customers we currently have, might be a good moment to revisit this decision, so I’m curious to hear how this functionality in community would be of value. 

Hi @Cristina I’m well aware of that functionality in Control, but this is about the front-end.

Today folks can’t easily message a person in the community. They have to find some way to get to their profile -- there is no directory so often that comes down to hunting around for posts or trying to find them on a leaderboard, then visiting their profile, then clicking SEND MESSAGE and writing it and sending it.

In short I want to make it easy for folks to connect, collaborate, and chat and as it sits that’s pretty hard. Maybe this ties into a need for a community directory too.

In Control but it follows a model where you have to select the users that will receive the message -- locating them by their community username (which isn’t always obvious). For me on that side, I’m messaging a person, which means I then need to find or locate their username (which again isn’t always obvious) and there’s no way in Control > Users to search by their name (just their email and username) which makes it even harder. 

I guess my mental model here is products like Slack and email. In Slack I can get to a directory and message anyone in the community. And in email, I can easily browse my address book by name and add folks that way vs. having to know their usernames and/or email addresses specifically.