Personal Messages (PM's) Sending and Replying

[Admin]

What is a Personal Message or PM?

A Personal Message is like an email but it stays within the Forum, think of it an an internal forum mailbox.  If you have been sent a PM the "My Messages" will have a number in brackets indicating how many messages you have in your forum mailbox waiting to be read.  e.g. MY MESSAGES (2)

To send a new PM, you can click on a persons forum name in the left column of a thread and a Summary screen will appear, on the left hand side you will see three column headings Profile Info, Modify Profile and Actions.  Under Actions there is an option to Send Personal Message... click on this option.

The New message screen will appear with the addressee will be automaticall populated, just fill in the Subject and the actual message then click Send Message (at the bottom of the screen)

Alternatively

Click on MY MESSAGES at the top toolbar

On left hand side under "Messages"  Click New Message and fill in the addressee (You have to know the name of who you want to send it to (there is a Find Members feature), type in a Subject and your message text and click on Send Message.


IMPORTANT NOTE:

Please be careful when replying to Personal Messages if you have been notified by email that you have been recieved a PM on the forum.  This notification is sent by the Admin Email account, so if you reply using your email program it DOES NOT send the reply to the person who sent you the mail, it sends the reply to the forum Admin mail address.  So ideally send your replies from the forum itself.

We are looking at a method of de-activating this email notification because members are replying to the wrong person without realising.

Thanks

Matt
 

[Thotos]

We are looking at a method of de-activating this email notification because members are replying to the wrong person without realising.

We had the same problem on the 131mirafiori.com forum. I got fed up with receiving people's private messages so I changed the email notification. What people now receive as an email notification is:

You have just been sent a personal message by xxxxxx on 131mirafiori forum.

IMPORTANT: Remember, this is just a notification. Please do not reply to this email.

Please log onto the forum to read your message.

You can read and reply to this Personal Message here: http://www.131mirafiori.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[MattNoVAT]

Thanks Theo, I have disabled the email notification on my profile, this works perfectly, but the task of doing this to all 1300 profiles is a little daunting. 

So maybe we do as you did and just change the text and hope people read it.   I hope we can change the default setting at registration.

[Thotos]

As long as the PM text does not appear in the email notification, people will not reply to it. 

[lanciamad]

Also worth noting, if you want to keep a copy of what you've sent someone, you must tick the box, "save a copy in my outbox" before sending. Otherwise you may receive a reply and not have a clue what about unless you've got a good memory.

[Thotos]

You can set it as a default to automatically store any messages you send. Select the option "Save a copy of each Personal Message in my outbox by default" in "Personal Message Options" in your profile.