Send message to user

[iurisilvio]

First of all, I don't want to blame a sponsor, I'm just reporting an issue.

I want to contact a sponsor to pay an issue, but didn't found a way to do it in private.

In my case, probably he just forgot it (he already paid me for other issues) and I don't really care about the payment, but I guess it is important to have some way to contact the sponsor.

[tonylampada]

Good catch, I think we need a whole "private message" system.
Do you agree?

[iurisilvio]

I don't know. It is hard to avoid noise with a private message system. Big services does not have it (GitHub, StackOverflow and more). Looks like too much complexity to just some messages. Most part of communication in FS is public.

Payment conflict is probably the only case when makes sense to have private communication. Maybe we can have something specific to help developers and sponsors solve the problem. A conversation page related with the issue, with a developer and a sponsor can be good to understand why the sponsor didn't paid.

[tonylampada]

Are you aware that there are two types of comments?
There are issue comments and offer comments.
Maybe we could show a "private" checkbox when adding an offer comment. Wdyt ?

[iurisilvio]

Didn't know about offer comments. Private offer comments are perfect to this problem. =)

[tonylampada]

Well I still like the private message system idea better.
A system like Facebook's could also be the right tool for the job.

The "send private message" option would be located on the users profile page and everything else should work pretty much like Facebook private messages.

Being on the user profile page, that option would not be widely visible, and probably (hopefully) only be used in cases such as this.

I'd like to get more opinions on this, I'll try inviting more people to join the discussion here.

[wolfv]

Hi, I'll try to add my view: I think developing a whole PM system is quite an overhead. Also I don't know how frequently people are «checking» back on FS. So it would result in FS sending an Email to the participant to ask him to check his private message on FS.

I think this could be avoided by just sending out emails. Maybe you/we could develop a system where the emails of the participants are hidden. E.g. send a mail to a hashed hash@freedomsponsors and then the email get's send along ... (Is it understandable what I mean?).

E.g. a conversation could be at one target email [email protected]

I think emails are more consistently checked compared to a private messaging system on freedomsponsors...

Just my 2 cents :)

[tonylampada]

How about this:

1 - You go to a user profile page (like http://freedomsponsors.org/core/user/2/tonylampada)
2 - You click a "send message to this user" button
3 - Compose subject and body, fill in a captcha, hit send.
4 - FS sends an email to that user.

The conversation is supposed to be private, so there's no need to store those messages on the database.

I think that's the simplest solution that solves the problem.
Sounds good?

[iurisilvio]

Perfect.