The chats for this forum are very basic, they let you send plain text messages, no attachments, emojis, links are just treated as text and so on. Not even a send button you just hit return to send.
But the Private discussions are very advanced.
Go to the private discussions page here
https://ddebunked.org/private
Then click on “discuss privately” and then you need to add one other recipient (you can’t just start a discussion with yourself).
Click here to choose recipient
Here I have chosen Support as the recipient
You need to click on it to add it to the list at the top of the form
And as soon as you have at least one recipient you can post to the private discussion.
Then
- you can post and reply with all the flexibility of discussion posts here, any length, rich text, embed etc. but it is all private to your recipient
- Also you can start as many private discussions as you like with the same people and you can do a private discussion with as many as you like.
You can also search all your private discussions.
This is great for helping scared people, because you can easily search for the past posts on the same topic for people who circle back to the same topic again and again. And you can answer in detail with embedded images, bullet points, section titles etc which can make your fact checks far easier to read for someone panicking.
And if you go to your profile page you’ll see all the public and private messages you’ve sent below your profile picture.
Privacy of the messages - admins can’t see them though not a place to store state secrets 🙂
Only you and the people you talk to can see the private messages. Unlike in some forum software the admins CAN’T see your private messages.
That is - don’t share anything here that’s a state secret or some such. In principle it is possible to see any of the messages while working on the databse, it’s all stored as plain text in the MySQL database which can be accessed by someone with server access (such as myself, needed it for setting up the forum and some advanced tweaks).
But we are not likely ever to need to look at the actual content of the database to fix anything and we will respect your privacy.
One exception - if your first post in the group is a private post, it is automatically shown to the admins so they can check to make sure it is on topic - once we approve it we can no longer see even the private post we approved
HOWEVER we do have the rule that your first post here must be on topic. If your first post is a private post the admins still need to see it to see if it is on topic for the group.
After that it’s private.
The way this works is the first post is automatically flagged, whether it is public or private.
- If your first post is public then we just approve that and then you can start private discussions and the admins can’t see those.
- if your first post is private then we see it, we check if it is on topic and if it is we approve it and we don’t see it any more after it is approved not even the post we approved.
Also please don’t flag a post in a private discussion unless yyou want to share it with admins - as we automatically see flaggged posts and the conversation they are in to moderate them
Then after that - if anyone in a private discussion flags a post we will see the discussion that was flagged so that we can moderate or help or whatever was the reason for flagging it.
So please don’t flag a discussion if it is something you want private from the admins.
Thanks!
