Provide a way to indicate status/presence in the community

Hi @Scott Baldwin! Thanks for submitting your idea, great stuff. Were you thinking of a Slack-style solution, where you can indicate your status with an emoji and an optional message?

As for the auto-reply, I’m curious as to how you imagine that feature. Would it reply every time there’s a reply in a thread you’re part of? I can imagine that getting noisy quite quickly, especially for superusers, for whom this feature seems most useful.

Not jumping to solutions, more focussed on the problem @alex.timmermann — will leave it with your team to come up with how best to address the problem/need. 
 

The goal here to be able to communicate to others. 

In the past, I’ve used the custom title to give my status as “unavailable” or “away” but I’m not sure if that is visible in the right places, as I still received messages.

I can see several approaches that would help:

• to set up an automatic reply
• a status that alerts anyone trying to message me that I’m unavailable, and perhaps direct them to another team member I could specify when I set my status
• suspend the possibility to send (me) a private message

I imagine this would be most useful for community managers, but perhaps also moderators or other very active users.