louiseb said:
I think newbies should be able to send and recieve private messaged straight away.
I read somewhere that they have to have made a certain amount of posts before being able to access pm?
there was a member kindly offering free meters but cant obtain the newbies adddress to post them due to not being able to pm them.
also when a new member joins and a modertor needs to contact them its isnt ideal that the newbie has to have posted x amount of posts before sending accessing the pm function.
This is common with most forums and is a restriction that SHOULD NOT be removed..
The purpose of the restriction is the verious abuses that happens with an non-restricted pm system..
First you've got spammers who don't post but PM. it is very difficult to ban a member if you have no IP address stamp on the forum, the only way of generating an IP is by posting to a thread..
As an Ex-Moderator of the forum and in the days before resrtictions on the PM it was abused by verious members of the forum, as a method of touting new members into their gang, it was also used to pass instruction between each other concerning which member to attack on open forum etc... I also knew when trouble was going to kick off, just by monitoring the pm activity what username was sending or recieving PM's...
And ensuring that members post on the forum before they get the PM facility, ensures that spammer and Trolls are kept off the forum as much as possible..
Take note since this restriction been put into place, there's been very little attacks of other members on the forum..