Personal Messages - please make sure your message box is not full

[William Whitaker]

This is a plea to the greater forum community to please police your PM inbox.

Again it has happened that a member has sent me a PM with a request. Yet when I attempt to reply, I am blocked because said member has exceeded some quota which disables his ability to receive further messages. AND that same member does not have the email option enabled, so there is NO WAY TO REPLY TO THAT INDIVIDUAL.

To the best of my knowledge (zip...) the forum software does not or is not capable of sending a notification to a full inbox that someone is trying to reach that person.

This is a very frustrating position to be in. And short of having a moderator intervene on a personal level (which they don't have time for, I'm sure), I don't see a solution unless we each keep our inbox trim and neat.

[Oren Grad]

Will's point is well-taken. Because of limitations on Forum resources, members can have a maximum of 200 stored PM's. The moderators cannot see or manipulate your PM's and as Will says, there is no automatic notification. So it's up to you to periodically prune your messages and make sure you have space to receive new messages. There are a number of options for saving your messages to your own computer so that you can retain them for reference even as you clear space in your PM box here.

[B.S.Kumar]

here is no automatic notification.

Are you sure, Oren? My inbox gets full occasionally, and I do get an email saying X person is trying to send me a message, but he can't, because my inbox is full.

One cause for this problem is that some people reply to each message in a new message, rather than replying within the box that is presented. Such individual messages must be retained until the discussion is complete, and this adds to the message count. To avoid this, please rely within the box, and delete the message to which the reply has been sent. This will keep the message count down.

Kumar

[Oren Grad]

Are you sure, Oren? My inbox gets full occasionally, and I do get an email saying X person is trying to send me a message, but he can't, because my inbox is full.

I can't find documentation of any such function, but it's certainly possible that I'm missing something.

[jp]

I've had situations in the past when my private inbox was full and received email alerts like B.S.Kumar has mentioned.

We can also email people by clicking on their name. I'm thinking this might bypass the private message feature.

[Oren Grad]

We can also email people by clicking on their name. I'm thinking this might bypass the private message feature.

That works only if the member has allowed email contact. As Will mentioned in starting this discussion, we occasionally have a situation in which a member's PM box is full and email contact is disabled.

[William Whitaker]

This issue is particularly annoying when using the FS Forum - whether selling or buying, either one. And the guidelines prohibit "announcements", which presumably would include remarks to clear one's inbox. Grrrrr......

[DennisD]

Will, your point us well taken - Thanks for raising the issue.

It's as annoying as trying to leave someone an important phone message but the voice mailbox is full.
We've all experienced that !

[Pfsor]

The moderators cannot see or manipulate your PM's...

Oren, you either don't know sufficiently the vbulletin or you don't say truth.
For all those who want to know about the possibility for moderators to read PMs - google "vbulletin can moderators read pm box" and read to your hearts desire. Won't say more about it for obvious reasons.

[Oren Grad]

I am not an expert on vBulletin - very far from it, in fact.

That said, I know of only two ways to gain access to member PM content. The first is to access the server database directly. Only one of us - Tom - is set up to directly access the vBulletin files on the server, and that access is used only to keep the Forum in operation and repair it when it goes down. Secondly, I am aware of the existence of vBulletin mods and hacks - at least for version 3, don't know about version 4 - that would allow access to PM content. There could be more that I am not aware of. We do not have such a modification and have no intention of implementing one.