Dansyacht wrote:
Just about every other forum on the internet allows sending a reply to a poster's message to the poster only. This is useful when you want to send contact info for a real time exchange without broadcasting it to the world. Any chance this feature will be added to ASC? Or is it hiding somewhere? đ
The Jive forum software does have the capability for private messaging. (Other forums I frequent that use Jive have private messaging enabled.) However, private messaging does have some potential abuse issues that have to be considered. For example, hiding discussions of illegal activities (i.e.: pirating software) or "hate mail". While "hate mail" can be handled with a "block messages from this sender" type of option, the discussion of illegal activities or other topics not allowed by the forum are tricky. It ends up becoming just more messages that the moderators have to monitor, but now they're hidden so are not reported by other members (like they are now when they're in the open forum areas.) And members tend to not like the idea that the moderators are reading their "private mail". đ So it's up to the forum operator to decide whether to have private messaging or not. With a forum like this that has a high volume of messages, I would imagine that reducing the workload on the moderators was likely a significant part of the decision.
BTW, one thing I do if I did want to contact someone is to use an email address I have purposefully setup for "junk mail." (i.e.: for surveys & contests.) I tell the person to send a message to the "junk" email address, telling me what their email address is. I can then send a message from my "normal" email and we correspond normally after that. That way the only email address that was "posted in the open" was the one that I was expecting to get junk mail anyway.