Add the option to send a message while adding someone to your circle

[rivenwanderer]

Title:
Add the option to send a message while adding someone to your circle

Area:
circle management UI

Summary:
When adding someone to your circle, sometimes you might want to send a note to that person introducing yourself as part of that process. I think it would be easy to add to the existing UI.

Description:
I've taken to sometimes sending people a note on DW when I friend them; I'm adding a lot of people I don't necessarily already know (which I didn't do on LJ). And of course there's nothing wrong with sending a note as a separate step! But I think it would be totally awesome if this was possible to do in a more integrated way:

Imagine if the "add to circle page" (http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/circle/add?user=[person]) had a checkbox reading "Add a message introducing myself" below the "Select colors" checkbox area. When clicked, it would reveal a small textarea for adding a note. Then, when the "Add [person]" button was clicked, the user you just added would also be sent a message titled something like "Add To Circle intro message from So-and-so". (It would either need to be from So-and-so, or have some other mechanism for replying to it easily). (Oh, and the checkbox would obviously only appear in the first place when adding a journal, not a community, and only when the user had permission to send a message to that account.)

Possible use-cases for introducing yourself that I can think of: telling the other person what names on other websites they might know you by, saying what interests you about their writing, noting whether or not you know each other IRL, or requesting to be on filters they've publicized the existence of. I think that it can personalize the "some random stranger subscribed to your journal" experience a lot, and making it easier for people to do so can only be a good thing.

I think this would be a relatively unobtrusive UI addition, unlikely to bother people who don't use it. And like journal colors, I don't think it needs to be integrated with the one-click adding thingie in the user context hover.

The only downside I can think of would be cluttering the inbox a bit (now you get 3 messages if someone subscribes, grants access, and PMs you).

Poll #1059 Add the option to send a message while adding someone to your circle

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

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This suggestion:

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Should be implemented as-is.
14 (30.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
17 (37.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
8 (17.4%)

(I have no opinion)
7 (15.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

(extreme minor editing for verb tense, 1:48am EDT)