I won't fully understand the reason for them being disabled, but I do understand the repercussions that it causes when disabling PMs on the message boards. There are a lot of things that are getting posted on the boards that are better suited for PMs than getting posted here. Being that one can easily block their email on the message boards as well, that's one extra complication that further influences users to post personal related messages to others directly on the forum, which ultimately ends up getting topics locked, when it could have been easily avoided, should a member have an opportunity to take it to a private medium where not everyone can read it publicly.
On top of all of this, users have started to post their emails on these forums. It may not be common sense to many, but there are spiders and crawlers that will crawl this website topic by topic with regular expressions trying to scan for emails so that they can bombard them with spam. This may be overlooked by many, but I would HIGHLY recommend users that are reading this and have posted their emails on these forums to go back and edit them out, or make them a more cryptic pronunciation (ever see on forums where it says: username [at] such and such domain [dott] com? instead of a properly spelled out email? Well now you know why, check out PHP's website, perfect example in the user comments).
All in all, I will not condone scanning personal messages as an administrator, as they are personal, and really, there shouldn't be any good reason to be scanning them begin with to find out that users are using it for whatever reason. I think it would be more beneficial to allow PMs, so that we have a not-public medium where users can take their BS to, instead of clogging these forums with lockable flamings.
I totally agree.
If Meiun has some incredibly technical reason that our petty minds don't understand, it may be an idea to open up pms only to people that have over 50 posts or have been registered for a month or something.
but I definitely think PMs should become re enabled.
I agree, PMs are definitely very key on any forum board.
Really havn't seen a ton of problems being caused by not having PM's enabled until recently, so didn't think it was a huge deal or loss not having them. But you do make a few good points, and there really is not too much of a reason for me to keep them disabled now I suppose anyways.
So there you go, PM away. Just be sure to use the report PM button if anyone uses them for anything inappropriate or that they shouldn't.
Thank you very much.
Does this mean the return of the Mafia forum game?
Quote from: Yankyal on September 25, 2010, 08:42:14 PM
Does this mean the return of the Mafia forum game?
Yes, it does. One quick look at the Forum Games section could have told you that. Unfortunately, not many people seem to signing up for it lately, been that way ever since a couple of flops were made *cough*RedOctoberandJackabomb*cough* and they never took off. Participation is always welcome.