Private Messages getting marked read due to automated rank messages

Well, that’s “fun.” Thanks for sharing the insight; I probably need to investigate this too. 

As for a work around, do you have the system email notification enabled for your personal account? From my experience, I get the system email immediately each time a user sends me a private message. If they send 3 before I get to it, there are three system emails. 

That would give you visibility into when they message you. But it doesn’t solve that when you get to the message thread, you’ll see the rank messages from you (and maybe their reply after it), as the message link defaults to taking you to the bottom of the conversation, rather than the specific message. 

As for the roadmap. I don’t recall anything shared previously around improvements to private messaging, but the most recent roadmap I’m aware of was 9 months ago. This post shares the TL;DR of what was on the webinar: 

Or if you join this group, it’s a good way to get an idea of what they’re actually working on. It’s not the roadmap or comprehensive, but they usually do product research user discovery sessions a quarter before they start building the feature. So from when they announce something to when you might see a beta is often about 6 months. 

Personally, I’d be surprised if there were improvements in this part of the platform within the next year. Roadmap items, current betas, and Product Research projects that haven’t yet launched are:

• notification center (“january” last I heard) 
• enhanced search experience (“january” last I heard) 
• community ai (a lot of various things here)
• Product Area hierarchy (beta)
• Personalization features in widgets (was midyear, but the post is gone so maybe that means they’re pivoting away)
• Social-like Feed, Emoji Reactions, Threaded Replies (in the roadmap webinar as a year+ away, haven’t heard anything since)

So all that to say, I don’t expect messaging UX to improve within those. You’ll probably be encouraged to create an idea. 

Thanks ​@DannyPancratz Unfortunately I cannot rely on notification emails.  I rarely get them even though they are enabled in my settings - probably some sort of delivery issue on our end.  This is complicated by that fact that the email address we use for community is not exclusive to community, it is a google group that for some reason is used for a bunch of other things, so it is difficult to filter out the Gainsight generated messages from others that are routed through the same account. Since my day-to-day workflow involves being in the control environment most of the time, I would rather rely on that interface to discover what needs my attention.

I’m not too concerned about the thread opening at the bottom, the main issue is not being able to filter out the automated messages and see the latest incoming message in the thread listing, because those make the messages area 95% noise.

I’m probably better off finding a workaround as it doesn’t sound like this area will be improved anytime soon.  Maybe an automation of some sort would work, like perhaps to send me a Slack message? 🤔

​@emiller This is not an ideal solution, but it helps in our community.

We have an “admin bot” account that requires an Admin license, specifically with the role “Community Manager”. For any automated messages related to ranks or badges, we set the “admin bot” as the sender of these messages.

This keeps the community team’s inbox clear so we can actually see private messages from members.

It’s not ideal because that’s a license you’re loosing for something that could be solved otherwise, and there’s a loss of personalization since the recipient knows they are receiving an automated message.

We’ve done this exact same thing in our public B2C community. We community managers and moderators don’t really interact with members through our personal inboxes but we have two joint account “Moderators” and “Admins”. “Moderators” -account is no longer used that actively, but the “Admins” is used for sending the automated private messages and is working well for that purpose 😊 

Hi ​@security_lion and ​@Suvi Lehtovaara That is an interesting idea and I will definitely consider that. Since the community is a private B2B space that is still relatively small and young (<10k members, <1 year old), using a bot would involve giving up the “personal touch” of the message coming from the CM.  I might think about changing the sender to someone else who doesn’t do active moderation as a compromise.  I’m not too thrilled about having to compromise on the member experience due to the absence of basic inbox functions, but I also understand the constraints product teams face.