Add Private messages to the API

Thanks for sharing this idea @danvers! We can see immediately the value of having an API endpoint to send a private message to a user and also some immediate security/privacy concerns about retrieving a private message and displaying them outside the community. Very interesting nonetheless!

To make sure we get a full picture of your proposed use case, could you elaborate on how you see this onboarding flow enabled by the platform’s private messaging functionality? Thank you! 

@danvers curious to know if you are using the automated private message for when you have new members join the Community? ie. when you joined this Community, @Julian sent an automated message welcoming you and shared some tips/articles to check out? I found that thats been pretty useful for our Community and getting them acquainted with the best practices quickly.

Beyond onboarding, here’s another use case. 

1. Someone asks a question
2. it gets replies that might be the answer
3. They ignore
   1. the automated system email 
   2. replies from others and moderators in thread 

I’ve had a lot of success getting answers marked using 3.2 as a tactic. But we know 3.2 might be an issue with reply notification settings (they might stop getting emails about replies if they don’t view an earlier reply). It also can clutter up the activity feeds showing topics as recently active when the activity is just “@user any updates?” 

Add Private Messages to the API would allow me to change this tactic (or add it as a later tactic after replies in thread) to a Private Message outreach. 

• Private Messages trigger a different system email that would go to their inbox
• That system email / all system emails can be unsubscribed 

Typing this out, I guess I could try to automate the same thing via direct email outreach… But I’d rather get them into the community. And I’d rather allow them to unsubscribe from these nudges if they don’t want them. Email outreach seems too aggressive, but a message on the platform doesn’t (to me). 

this seems pretty important for an “Agentic” future, IMO. 

Here’s another use case: 

I want to add Highlighted replies to our gamification and incentives and I want to notify them when this happens (and the points they’ve earned)

• Some times more than one user provides a useful reply; only one can be marked as the answer
• There is no notification (neither system email nor notification center) for when your reply is highlighted

With this functionality, I could automate a private message to let them know that I (or another moderator) highlighted their reply in the post and they received X points. 

This type of positive reinforcement and awareness is key to that type of gamification tactic. 

Additionally, with additional front end moderation on the roadmap, I (or other Community Managers) may want to automate similar notifications.

Thought of two new use cases for this in my community this morning alone. So commenting for visibility to reinforce that it’d be a valuable addition to our toolkit. 

Both use cases are along the lines of the community best practice to “praise in public, provide feedback in private.”

The summary of my new use cases:

As a moderator, there are certain types of posts that I’d like to automate private feedback on. This is better to do in private than publicly on the thread (especially for open communities, but also just because it’s a different topic that then thread). 

For example, feedback on the quality of their post (potential moderateKit enhancement if this api existed cc: ​@Graeme Rycyk). My colleagues often complain about the quality of some questions. We’ve tried to address that with best practices in the side bar when they create a post, but it still happens. 

What if AI could use those best practices as rules to score the quality of the question, then message the user privately with feedback if it falls below a specific score? The objective would be to improve their future posts, but also to get them to update it within the 60 minute window to edit their posts. 

The faster they add the missing details and context, the more likely they’ll get a fast and better answer. Otherwise it’s likely the first few replies will be asking for the missing information, etc. From my experience, these are the threads that most often lead to poor results or go unanswered. 

(now a lot of that use case is AI, but such an enhancement would be blocked by this idea as a requisite) 

This is a fantastic idea, ​@DannyPancratz.

Case in point, my Gainsight support requests always go much, much better when I’ve already saved screenshots of the issue in question and have typed out my full answer.

We obviously can’t force posts in a specific format, but it’s sort of like working with AI. My new mantra when querying AI (picked up from a HarvardX course) is:

“Be correct, be precise.”

If you don’t include the relevant information… you’re not gonna have a good time.