vBulletin private messaging - does it eat up a lot of resources?
 

There are some webmaster forums (vBull based) that have Private Messaging.

It's a very handy feature (for actual webmasters who do business, etc)

I'm wondering why GFY doesn't have PM feature enabled.

Is it because it eats up a lot of server resources?

Every board that has them, gets spam through them. With that, I turn off all forum email notifications, I get enough trash mail without 50 forums spamming the piss out of me too.

A few months back I noticed a forum I visit as well had several PM's sitting in it, I went and looked around and noticed I have several board accounts with PM's in them. Half the ones I did check was spam crap.

no clue about the reason gfy dont but here are the benefits of no PM and no Email notices

No PM = more talk on forum itself = more reasons for others to chime in

No Email notice of new message = forces people to come back to check if there is a new response = good chance they will see other thread and comment on that etc

Other things to do to build a huge message board (even thou its 99.9% fail) is to have few sections, ever go to a new board and it has 50 categories

we are too cool for school

wtf are they thinking.. .

PM's would be cool, if they had an option to add a user to the PM system, like in ICQ.
If you don't add someone, you can't receive messages from them.

Spam could be also prevented by the current rule (?) that new GFY accounts from gmail or hotmail etc are not accepted.
And if current GFY'ers would spam others too much, they'd get banned.

ah well, I don't see it happening anyway... though they added that useless friends feature suddenly a few months ago.. so who knows..

Maybe the board owners have no idea what they are doing?

There is a PM system on IQ69 and DamageX board, and I don't get any spam at all.


Not really. You don't use PM discuss anything. You use it as a quick way to contact a person. Like if he is selling something, you just PM him with a question/proposition without jumping through the hoops of finding his contact info or adding him to ICQ, etc. It really rocks.

it rocks as someone who uses the forum but as someone who owns the forum its best as must possible is kept on the forum

I actually agree. If you moderate your board right, spam shouldn't be a problem. Most boards do use the PM feature, and the majority of them know how to keep spammers under control.

I run it on all the vBulletin installs that I use and I don't see a major use of resources from it.

You can disable members from using PM in vBulletin until they reach a certian post count. You can also limit the number of PMs that someone can send at one time. It's not worth it for a spammer to send one PM to each person vs bulk.

You can allow members to turn off the ability to receive PMs and/or email notifications of the PM or restrict them from being able to change that setting.

Yup, once you get one spam in there the moderator/administrator can delete all the PMs from the spammer. 90% of the people wouldn't know they were spammed.

This sounds pretty good.

Quick! Someone coerce Eric into setting this up! :1orglaugh

Just don't make the requirement 3000 posts...at least for another week. :1orglaugh