Currently there's no built-in way to restrict private messaging so that regular members can only send messages to staff, and not to each other. This was confirmed by support when we asked about migrating a v4 Cloud community that relies on this via a third-party plugin.

Use case: for communities where member-to-member DMs create a risk of being poached by competitors, spam, or unwanted solicitation, it would be valuable to have a native permission/group setting that limits private messaging to staff-only, rather than requiring a third-party app or plugin.

This seems like it could fit naturally into the existing Messenger permission settings per group. Would be great to see this considered as a core option in a future release.

Has anyone else needed something similar?

Not private messaged, but have you considered setting up a forum for contacting staff instead? I ask as you can set this so people can only see their own topics, and only staff would be able to see all topics. For what you are describing, it would seem to resolve that issue for you. Not to discourage the suggestion in any way, but more to give you a solution you could implement today. You would then just switch private messaging off entirely

Thanks Marc, that's a great workaround and we've actually already implemented it on our v4 community — works well.

That said, I'd still like to keep the original request open, framed a bit more broadly.

Invision already has a very solid permission system per forum — for each forum you can control, per user group, who can view, post, reply, and download attachments. What's missing is that same level of control for Messenger.

Right now it's all-or-nothing: PMs are either fully open between all members, or fully disabled. A native permission matrix for Messenger — similar to forum permissions — would let admins define which groups can message which other groups. For example: members in a certain group (based on the product/subscription they purchased) could message staff or moderators, but not other regular members; or specific groups could be allowed to message each other while others can't.

This isn't just about restricting to staff-only — it opens a much more flexible permission model, consistent with how the rest of the platform already works. Our forum-as-inbox setup solves our immediate case, but a native solution like this would remove the need for that workaround, and for third-party plugins like the one we used to rely on in v4.

Appreciate the quick and practical suggestion in the meantime.