Why is it that on this board there is no private messaging and/or e-mail capability?

I have often wanted to contact a person either out of curiosity regarding a subject, just to say hi, or ask a question. It really did'nt need to be in/on the public forum.

PM's are (all?) disabled and I find it hard to believe that every person on the board chose no e-mails when they enlisted to the board.

Is there a reason for this?

 

PM tend to take up space as well as more resources (not that much though). Admins can delete PM's or limit how many are allowed, which is totally cool. Hell, they can even read them if they do the hack upgrade (I know, that really isn't cool).

Anyhoo, as for email, it's set as "Default" to yes on emails. You'd be surprised at how many actually do not want to be bothered.

I for one think it's better to allow "yes" emails default, and to "see" them by default, instead of using the board for emailing it. The user should have the choice of deciding yah or nah. But some admins do not like the fact that their member lists could be stolen, plus not to mention you'll have to go through their site in order to contact a member (which means more hits). I can understand that.

Anyhoo, you probably should address this to Steve directly.

 

Actually, this has nothing to do with it at all. The reason that we block public display of email addresses to everyone is to avoid spam harvesters from exploiting nearly 25000 highly targeted email addresses.

The PM issue has been discussed several times since we implemented this new forum software a couple years ago...in reality, heavy use of PM does take up a tremendous amount of disk space, but the reason that it is disabled here is because I find the feature counter-intutive to what forums are...mediums for publicly accessible one-to-many communications.

I have said it before and I will say it again, IMHO, private messaging is one of the stupiest pieces of functionality ever added to message board/forum software. If you want to communicate directly with a user, you can email them, if they have opted to receive email. One-to-one communication is what email is for.

This forum software simplifies that process...click on the "Profile" button below the user's post and click the link to send them email...again, if the user has opted to receive email in this fashion...their choice, the way it should be.

 

You must have set the default to no when people first register, at least that's the way it seems.

I've tried several and have not yet found one that has e-mail enabled.

Now on the Harley board, it isn't the same way. I tried several, and everyone of them was enabled.

Why so on the L board?

 

The ability to receive email is set by the individual user in their control panel (the CP button above) and not by the administrators at the forum level, so if you are finding this to be the case, it is because the members in the Lightning forum are more likely to have turned this feature off.