Hello,

Clinton and I had one of our Dark Admin Discussions a couple of days ago. There's a problem to acknowledge, and a couple of possible solutions. We decided that neither of us was 100% sure about what to do, so as happens very occasionally, the Body Politic (that's you) are now included in the discussion.

OK, some ground rules.

1. It's still not a democracy. This is not a "thumbs up, thumbs down, count'em" discussion, nor do you get more points by showing how brilliant, upset, or whatever you might be. We're looking for ideas, for some data, and for solutions, not votes in whatever guise.

2. We've seen it before and we'll see it again - propose any sort of change at the Forge, and everyone instantly gives birth to little green hopping frogs. Oh My God. You're Changing It. I'm Birthing Frogs. Oh My God. So, this time, I'm gonna ask you to look back over the years, and remember the first time we changed the color scheme, and the time we did this or that, and when the two big-ass forums were closed, and also remember that the Apocalypse did not, in fact, arrive as predicted. Please, this time, try to Birth Your Frogs for a while by yourself, and return to posting after you've recovered.

3. The Forge is in a state of stepwise reduction. Very few features will ever be added, starting from over a year ago, and you can count on things getting folded up and put away. Remember, very slowly, in functional series of steps, the Forge will be shut down. So observing that today's proposal will be a "loss of function" isn't very insightful. We know. That's why it's proposed.

OK! So, with that buildup, this is going to be a doozy, right? I'll start with an observation.

In the past and in the present, people abuse the function of the Forge using the private messaging feature. Yes, I know, most of you use it for individual socializing. Yes, I know, being able to PM a moderator is often important. I'm talking about something else.

I'm talking about when someone new who's posting, and getting answers or whatever, and then some of you swim up under the guy like U-Boats and nail him with PMs. I am well aware this has been used to dissuade people, occasionally, from continuing to post here. I am also aware that in some cases, a person has received friendly reassurance and felt better about the discussion, but you should know that this often goes sour.

I'm also talking about people instigating flame-wars by PMing everyone who's participating in a discussion, therefore carrying on a kind of shadow conversation that only they can see all of.

All of this stuff is just plain no good. It abuses the transparency and responsibility of the Forge, in which points of view and commentary are supposed to be right out in front of God and everybody. It abuses me and Clinton - when you PM someone to "explain" how they are being a jerk or whatever, then the person sees you as a moderator, as if you were an agent of me and Clinton, and goes off thinking this place is run using secret police. If a person doesn't like the way I moderate and then leaves, that's one thing; if they feel like they were covertly beaten up in an alley with my tacit approval, that's another.

And furthermore, it's redundant. If you really need to talk to person X, why then, email him or her. If you don't have their email, then that's the signal that says "I don't want to talk to you," and that's just your tough luck. The PM function here should not be your way to get into the face of whomever you want, in the guise of "being at the Forge."

So Clinton and I are considering turning them off.

(waits)

Frogs all birthed? Remembered that Clinton and I aren't idiots and have already considered lots of things about it? Here are a couple.

• A lot of us, me included, have a huge personal archive of personal messages, some of which we really don't want to lose. So we're not talking about deleting those.
• Communication with moderators should still be easily available. If PMs are turned totally off, then that will have to be by email. But maybe there's some way to retain moderator PM function; Clinton's looking into the various software options.
• Some other sites, the most obvious probably being Story Games, now offer a more social/casual environment (including private messages) that the Forge no longer needs to provide.

So! Here's what we need from you, in this thread.

What are the most positive and most negative functions of private messages, here, that you have actually experienced?

Can you think of alternative methods that will maximize the former and minimize the latter? Clinton and I are totally not sold on what I described above! If you can propose something that can solve the problems and will be less work, then we want to know about it.

Let the Wild Rumpus begin!!

Best, Ron (following suitable kicks in the shin from Clinton)

What are the most positive and most negative functions of private messages, here, that you have actually experienced?

My experience has been entirely positive.  It's been a substitute for email on most occasions.  I've never received a "U-Boat" message, or sent one to my knowledge.  I've never been part of a sub rosa conversation facilitated by PM. 

Can you think of alternative methods that will maximize the former and minimize the latter?

If there is a group for whom they are really important social or productivity tools, maybe they can pay for them individually and contribute to the upkeep of the site.

Ack! I'm having frogs! They're hopping around the floor! ACK! :-)

What are the most positive and most negative functions of private messages, here, that you have actually experienced?

Can you think of alternative methods that will maximize the former and minimize the latter? Clinton and I are totally not sold on what I described above! If you can propose something that can solve the problems and will be less work, then we want to know about it.

Frankly, email does the same function better.  It's specialized, it's a huge and robust system, and it is completely independent of Forge resources.  I can keep archives better and more centrally, I can filter ... all that jazz.

I hadn't thought of it until you mentioned it, but now that you have ... sure.  I've never had a negative PM experience ever, and so what?  If it were removed today then by the end of a few weeks, people would be fine.

I've largely used it as a substitute for e-mail, which I consider a humongous hassle, actually, since my e-mail is easier to manage and short (my PM box is a wild and hairy wasteland that makes me wince and wish I could get around to cleaning out.)

The best use of PMs, for me, has been to say "this is my e-mail address, contact me here" in a private manner that doesn't expose either side's e-mail address to the whole damned world.  Now that I have a public e-mail address, this function is largely obsolete.

yrs--
--Ben

I can't think of a time any use of a PM was of paramount importance for me. My contact info is visible, and anyone who wants to get ahold of me can.

I mean really, think about this: I get an email telling me I got a PM, and the contents of the PM are in the email, but I can't reply there. I have to go to the Forge and reply, and at work I can't access the Forge because I work for Fascists. That must be the case for many people. So I get messages I can't reply to for like 8 hours, and my short-term memory is total ass.

For me Forge PMs are currently the only way to stay in touch with any Forge related discussions at all during the day.  My office firewall blocks just about any form of personal email so simply "using email" isn't an option for me.

But then all in all I find the whole "diaspora" thing to be a huge disappointment and a major pain in the ass.  So I'm rather biased about the whole process.

For me, PMs have almost entirely been as an "email substitute," and isn't anything I couldn't do with email. On the positive front, it's been nice having side conversations with people that would've been frowned upon in forums. On the other hand, those side conversations could've just as easily been done over email.

Well, I'm one of those guys that isn't often struck with something substantial to say in a particular thread.  Others on this forum are much better versed in the language than I and are capable of posting with greater frequency, so I normally let other people talk everything out unless there's something really glaring that I think needs discussing. 

Because of my personal tack when it comes to the Forge, I really like having the PMs available.  I use them chiefly to just send little messages of support, stuff that doesn't contribute to the conversation and shouldn't clutter up a thread.  "Hey, that's a great idea.  I'll be following this."  That sort of quick little booster thing.  I've recieved a couple of booster PMs in my day for criminal element that have really lit a fire under my ass. 

But there's no reason that this has to be done through PMs.  Honestly, if you want to keep around that kind of personal conversation funcionality, require posters to have a public email.  Set one up at hotmail, yahoo, gmail, wherever if you don't want to use your personal email.  This takes some weight off of the servers.  It could also have the maybe possitive effect of dragging those private conversations out into the public.  Just as many smart things are said in whispers as are said in open forums.

Hope this helps, Ron and Clinton. 

Speaking of PM's...I just received Spam this morning via a PM from another poster.

It was my first negative experience and seems to me to be a very big violation.

Ron or Clinton, I can forward the spam for you to see if you want....but I doubt I'm the only one.

If that spam is from "Don Johnson", I just recieved it as well.
Barring that, the primary use of PMs for me is when someone in a thread says, "I have this file for this game, anyone who wnats it should contact me by PM."
That's a very valuable resource. But if everyone (that offers such a service) has a email link in their posts - as is often the case now - then email would work just as well.

BUT - if that email link is present, the people who are abusing PMs will just use that email link to do the same. So, I'm not sure that removing PMs will solve the problem, unless you also remove public emails as well. That might create more problems than it solves.

I've had good use out of it, discussed some useful stuff.  I  like to keep forge stuff on the forge as it were; I don't use email much privately.  It has served as an escape route from the dogpile.

Hi there,

My opinion is similar to Ben Lehman's : I never used the PM function much, but never had trouble with it. I don't care much what happens to it.

Personally, I find sharing with other designers' experience very insighftul, but I don't need PM, and I believe though moderation is necessary to prevent the forums from degenerating, the main reason why I avoid most other public forums. Still I'm surprised that The Forge is expected to die. Perhaps I understand wrong, though.

I'm a newbie : getting immersed in The Forge's social contract and customs is a lot to swallow and I often feel like unvoluntary stepping on toes, like I miss some Forge-specific social conventions, which is confusing a bit. Thus, I might miss the whole point, but IMHO Ron Edwards and Clinton Nixon have put forward very solid decisions so far so they're probably right about shutting down PM.

Regards,

Erick

I haven't had particularly negative experiences with PM. Sometimes somebody asks me to discuss something or other in more detail, and I do. Not a problem. My most important positive usage of the PM function has been contacting the various designers en masse about, say, getting together a retail package for me. PM is better for this because I haven't gotten around to creating any kind of central database of you all's email addresses. I also notice - this might be my imagination - that the reply percentages are better with PM compared to email; I don't know whether this is because folks switch email addresses frequently, or because they don't read their email as religiously as their PM, or for some other reason. Some people who take a month or more to answer email, if they answer at all, will be very prompt when using the PM feature.

I think that removing PMs, while not earthshattering to me personally, is not so significant as to warrant action. Like, why do it, again? Because somebody somewhere got annoyed by something somebody said in PM? If that is the case, I recommend the people in question stop reading their PM. The system is socially autonomous from the rest of the Forge because the moderators do not read those messages, so I see no point in worrying about what people do in PM. As Darren implied, the very same things might just as well happen in email, and nobody expects Ron to go shut down our email servers...

Ribbit.

I find PM to be awfully convenient.  I don't use it for anything I couldn't use e-mail for.

James

I've found PM to be a good way to ask for someones private email address in the first place, as many people are understandably reluctant to post their email addresses in archived public forums, where they can be harvested by spam bots for the rest of eternity.  So if PM as a general thing is shut down, it would be nice if there was an equivalent "handshake" mechanism by which you could request someone elses contact info.

Ditto rafial. The only thing that PM offers me that I couldn't do equally well over email is allowing me to request for others email addresses in the first place.

I've found the Forge p.m. an excellent way to contact people whose emails I couldn't track down & others have used it in the same way for me. Over the last year I've actually had a lot of business and con related conversations via pm here which has been incredibly positive for me, but all of those convos could have taken place by email. 

Over the years, I've been glad to have the pm channel to send little "right on" emails to people that would have been seen as static on a main thread, but I'm not married to it. Thanks for making it available all this time, Clinton.

best,
Em

As long as there's an easy way to contact the admins - to ask about something, to apologize without cluttering up the threads, to report a problem etc. - I think we're golden without PMs. It's easy to contact Clinton or Ron via email and they are clearly marked as admins, so newbies shouldn't have any trouble.

Regards,

Hal

As other people has commented previously I have found the PM convenient for contacting people and getting eMail addresses. Rafial's idea about "handshake" sounds pretty well.

Arturo

I do not belive my personal PM experiences are in any way (a) significant enough to impact your decision as moderator or (b) positive enough at The Forge for me to miss them (I guess I'm one of the U-Boat victims, here).

Kill them... I have in every forum I operate.
PM is pointless, with free e-mail accounts that hold 1GB of plain text indefinitely.

My main concern with the PMs has already been addressed; I don't want my archived messages deleted, at the very least without plenty of warning, so I can save their contents myself. Although it doesn't seem like it, I'm still an active reader here, and I'm still working at my snail's pace on my games. In my PM folder, there's a lot of groundwork level discussion about all of my projects, and I refer to it semi-frequently.

I don't know that I've had any bad experiences, and I hope I've not perpetrated any of these U-Boat PMs. I'd prefer to still have access to sending PMs, but I can't think of any particular alternatives, and wouldn't be heart-broken if they went away. I don't really like these forums format for PMs anyhow. If these bad things are happening though, there's really not anything that can be done about it. They'll continue in e-mail, but they won't have any sort of "official"-ness that PMs might imply, and they'll not take up Forge bandwidth and storage space, which I imagine is at least part of the problem.

Rafial brought up the only really important point though. I'd thought that phpbb had a secure way to e-mail, but upon checking, it displays the email in the bottom line of the browser.. So if there is a way for these forums to allow e-mailing without exposing the e-mail address, that would solve the one big problem.

Blah blah blah no bad PM experiences blah would like other "handshake" mechanism of some kind.

Seriously, all discourse that I've had via PM could have been done via email, so long as I had a way of getting the other person's email address or they had a way of getting mine.  If, for example, instead of the PM button, there were a "ping user" function that would send a brief automated message to the email that the user has on file, including my email address, that would be fine.

I also know enough about computers to know that this isn't necessarily as easy as it looks on paper, so please read this idea as including the requisite amount of humility and appreciation for the work that has already been done.

Echoing everyone else, here:

1) No bad PM experiences until the porn spam this morning (ick).
2) A lot clumsier than just using email.
3) A "handshake" to avoid making your email public would be nice and nifty, but by no means essential. (I used to be nervous about making my email publicly available, but my company has put it on every article I write for years, and I have yet to be spammed or stalked as a result).

Plus, as I posted on Vincent Baker's site back when the GNS forum was put out of its misery, "I trust Ron. He's earned it." (I trust Clinton too, yeah, but the baby frogs always go for Ron for whatever reason).

Ahey, :)

I'd like to offer a suggestion, if I may.

Replace the 'Send PM' button with a 'Send My Email To This User' button. When pressed, this button would have the Forge send an email to the user with an appropriately formated 'Reply To:', with a short text of 'The user {Forge User Name Here} would like to contact you via email'. The user name could be a link to the Forge user profile page of the button presser.

Advantages:
1. This cannot possibly be confused with moderator function
2. It still permits usages of 'PM me if you want this file'
3. It still assures privacy, as your email goes out only to those that you want it to go out to
4. At first sight, it seems utterly valueless for spam usage (although I'm sure spam bot writers more creative than I would eventually prove me wrong...)
5. Seems easy enough to do in PHP, although I'm not all that familiar with the innards of SMF...

Thoughts?

Cheers,
J.

One thing I have found PMs useful for is that they are an extremely reliable way to reach me.  Every so often a new person emailing me will get lost in one of my spam filters.  This is, clearly, a bad thing.  Since I have email notification of Forge PMs, and they don't get caught by my spam filter, anyone who sends me a PM can be sure that I will see it.

But it turns out that there's a solution to this, and a pretty simple one.

Since every user has to have a functioning email account to sign up, there should be an email address for every user (right?).  You could replace the PM function with an email function.  One that takes whatever text you are wanting to input from an HTML field and then sends it through the Forge message server (or something) with the return address of the sender.

This lets you A) bypass spam filters (as long as you're getting emails from the Forge), B) Move the PM function to email, C) Keep email addresses private, and D) Ensure that you only give out your email to someone who you are interested in talking to.

Thomas

All that sounds groovy if Clinton can actually implement it without breaking his back and/or brain, but this whole conversation inspired me to "unhide" my email on my Forge profile, so as far as I'm concerned PM just became obsolete.

I keep thinking of stuff I use (or can imagine using) PMs for, and why I might miss them, and every single last one of them, the real truth is that it's basically me freeloading off of the Forge for something I could do with a dedicated e-mail address and a little effort.

One thing did jump out at me, though. It might not be entirely cool for StoryGames to suddenly become "the Forge's backyard" to any greater extent than it already is. We should all take responsibility for being good citizens of both those communities.

Positive
PM lets me contact people without their knowing their email.  When I was new, I didn't like giving my email out. I still don't, except that after I started my Timfire Publishing, I purposely set up an email account to handle public stuff. Not everyone here has made their email address public, so PM is still useful for contacting people.

Negative
I've received spam a couple times, but only a couple times over the last 3 years.

If you wanted to get rid of PM, you would need to have some way to "ping" people here at the Forge at their real email address. But will that really get rid of the "U-boat" issues? People will just U-boat each other via their real email. And if people start disabling access to their email, you might up with a bunch of "Paging so-and-so" threads.

Hi there,

Great responses, so far. Here are some ideas I'm coming to prefer.

1. "Send email" as a button. I was under the impression that such a thing existed, but maybe that was with the previous software. You didn't have know the person's email and you didn't find out what it was; as I recall, the Forge sent your message to them with your email included, so they could reply.

2. Regarding the U-boat thing, if people do it by email, at least they're doing it individually and the effect is literally not part of the Forge itself. It's a very serious turf thing - by getting a rough PM here, when you're a newcomer, you're still on the other guy's turf. If he emails you, he has to come to your turf. I think that will psychologically cancel most of the U-boating, although again, it's not the phenomenon that bugs me the most, it's the fact that it's associated with "the Forge" as a feature of the site.

Best, Ron

Ron wrote:
1. "Send email" as a button. I was under the impression that such a thing existed, but maybe that was with the previous software. You didn't have know the person's email and you didn't find out what it was; as I recall, the Forge sent your message to them with your email included, so they could reply.

2. Regarding the U-boat thing, if people do it by email, at least they're doing it individually and the effect is literally not part of the Forge itself. It's a very serious turf thing - by getting a rough PM here, when you're a newcomer, you're still on the other guy's turf. If he emails you, he has to come to your turf. I think that will psychologically cancel most of the U-boating, although again, it's not the phenomenon that bugs me the most, it's the fact that it's associated with "the Forge" as a feature of the site.

If by "the old software" we're meaning phpbb2, it does have it. Unfortunately, anyone hovering over the send-email button can look at the bottom bar of IE and see the "mailto:address@email.com" command.

When sent, it appears to send it from the sender's email address, to the recipient's, without any sort of reference to the sending website. If the command in the bottom bar of IE could be obscured, this method would work out.. though, again, it's the old software.

(If you're interested in seeing the specific results of this, feel free to send me test e-mails via my boards at http://wolvesdenproductions.com/phpBB2/memberlist.php Send to WDP_Admin, as my main "posting name" doesn't have an e-mail address listed.

As the only other Mod for the top tier forums, I find the PM function pretty useful. It gives me a reliable hub from which I can contact and be contacted by anyone at the forums. I am not always in front of my email machine so email does not necessarily serve the same purpose. Having coordinated a number of Forgie things, I've found that PMs are a safe, easy and quick way to organize/coordinate. Berry useful, Batman.

The only drawback is my current total of 483 messages. The PM interface is clunky and sorting through all those PMs is a pain in the ass, so I let them grow in the dark with the frogs.

-Luke

So the benefits of the Personal Message system are:

• Communication with users without making email addresses apparent.
• The ability to deal with other users in a group.

The Downsides are:

• People hiding their ugliness by preying on the weak via the PM system. (This is an off-handed compliment to the moderation on the site by the way.)
• Spam

So I personally like be able to get private communication without exposing my email address. I presently get no spam, and would like to keep it that way. Robots make that impossible by exposing an email address on a webpage. I also understand wanting to make it a more welcoming place for new folks.

The idea of having a feature to press a button to email someone may reset the balance of Sharks versus Fish. If such an option is made it should be opt in. I have no specific examples of what could go wrong with such a system, but it makes me wonder about what unintended security consequences it might have. I think that if such a thing were made it should have a timer between uses by IP address to avoid a favorite tactic of maladjusted internet youngsters in the early to mid 90's called the email bomb. Also I would be concerned that without a timer and requiring a user to be logged in, such a button could be used as a primitive way to DDOS (a.k.a Denial of Service) The Forge, and someone's mail server at the same time.

Also if the idea is to re-balance the power level a bit between the Sharks and Fishes perhaps the button could actually send a request for an email dialogue that exposes the person pressing the buttons email address. For example, I Clyde want to shark newbie John. I click John's name for his profile, press the dialogue button, and the server sends a request to John, saying user Clyde whose email address is: somefictionaladdress@someplace.org wants to have an email dialogue with you. Send him an email at his address if you would like to do so, otherwise feel free to delete this message and go on with your business. This means I have to expose myself and John has basically done me a favor by sending an email which should reduce sharking in most humans. I also feel more comfortable getting to choose which one of my addresses I want to expose to someone on the site. Especially since the address has most likely been verified by the Forge already in the creation of the users account.

However this second option may be much harder to code, if the other method were chosen I would either opt out or create a void email address. I doubt my level of paranoia would be shared by other folks.

A quick point for folks worried about exposed e-mails: Yahoo, Hotmail, and Google (to name the Big Boys) will give you a free e-mail account if you fill out a form. I believe they all hold 1GB of mail--with your typical plain text, short e-mail, that's many millions of messages, sortable, folderable, flaggable, etc....

My personal solution to net presence versus spam is to pay $4 a month for my own hosting service and set up aliases (forwards, really) for every site at which I have a significant presence. If I start to get more spam then I'd expect, I check the header to see the To address, which in turn tells me the culprit site. Filters and/or killing the forward (i.e. redirecting it to a spam collection Yahoo account) solve the rest.

Yes, I get about 300+ spam a day into my "dump" account... but even then, most of it goes to a Bulk folder thanks to Yahoo spam filters. Every few weeks, I check the dump to empty trash and keep it alive: one must log into these free accounts on the regular, or they deactivate.

In summary, in these days of the Internet, I think one really must have a Public ID to use online and Private ID to use with friends and family (just make sure they know not to send you shit from Hallmark and Blue Mountain using it! Silly auntie...). I just happen to have something like 35 Public IDs at the moment, vis a vis e-mail addresses.

HTH;
David

First to identify myself - a new comer to Forge, only been a week. Since some of the original comments were related to how a newcomer feels with the PM, I thought I would reply. If that is incorrect or inappropraite, I apologize in advance.

I personally like the PM system, it keeps game stuff in game stuff for me. When I want to engage in game stuff, I can log in and check it. If I don't want to, then I can ignore it for a few days for when I do feel like it. I am more likely to use PM to discuss with someone something than email, probably because of my own personal perception of email. I feel like this is a place for a focused discussion on a particular topic. Email is for correspondence, in the classic sense of the word. And so I hide my email address, I don't want people to email me at my private email address. Its like getting a bunch of junk mail at my personal mailbox. If I choose to engage someone at a more personal, rather than topical level, then I get involved in email.

I too am one of the people that keep 3 email addresses, I don't want to have four.

My final topic on PM and being a newcomer. And this is not meant as a criticism on a personal level, but as feedback as one of the masses and new people since it was a topic raised as to why they are considering removing the PM function. It isn't the PM's that I get that scare the hell out of me as a newcomer, in fact I feel much more comfortable with PM than actual posting. Its some of the stickies in the forum scare the hell out of me, such as the one in Actual Play. PM's I can shrug off with flame-proof armor, but moderator stickies to me have the "site stamp of appoval" on them. And I have gotten the impression, right or wrong that in the main forums for Forge, "Forge isn't for wussies, it is for the sersious and the hardcore" where as I haven't gotten that in the subforums on some of the infdividual games (which is why I came here in the first place for those). I haven't gotten any u-boat PM at all. Again apologies if the last paragraph is offtopic and please understand that it is not meant as an attack but an observeration on "first impressions" to the site, but I thought it would relevant to the first portion of the original post.

Cheers,

Tokyo Steve

Hello,

Steve, I appreciate the feedback and I hope this will make sense ... your feedback lets me know that the stickies are doing their job. That atmosphere of focus (a better word than "serious") is exactly what this site is about. There are plenty of places on the internet to hobnob about being a gamer and about this-or-that upcoming title, or whatever. This isn't one of them; we have stuff to do and want a place for like-minded people to learn from one another.

You were very careful about your first posts and took the time to choose your words carefully and to be as clear as possible. That's a virtue. It's also led to a number of people being interested in your posts and being willing to provide feedback. If the stickies contributed to all of these things, which apparently they did, then my only response is, "Excellent!"

I feel no need to make people feel good when they arrive at the Forge. It's far more important to impress on them that they are, in fact, 100% welcome, as long they are prepared to think, to learn the rules (as opposed to "being on the internet"), and to be polite. I'm confident that enough people are out there who respond positively to such standards, even if it's a little scary, for the site to work, and so far, five years in and with a great new trend in new posters becoming very active, it's worked beyond my and Clinton's wildest speculations.

Best, Ron

It'd be cool if, much in the same way peoples e-mail addreses were automatically not show unless the user opts to, their ability to recieve PM's was by default, off. That means new people would have to know it was off, then turn it on before they can be u-boated.

That takes the edge off at first, anyway. I don't know when users become caloused and embittered enough that Ron and Clinton think their u-boat proof. :) Couple of months? No option to have PM for first month or two?

Prob with both of those that I recognise already - probably require special coding knowledge. Easy if you have it, pipe dream otherwise.

BTW, to all the old hands who are saying they haven't had a bad experience, isn't Ron focusing on the new bloods experience here, not you guys?

The biggest advantage that the PM system has over email is that you can see that you have received one whilst you are still on the site, which can be useful at times (particularly if it is in response to a post in the "Connections" forum).

To be honest I don't really use PM's on *any* forums that much.  For some reason it just dosn't show up on my radar, and I have been known to go months with out noticing a PM.

So I wouldn't miss PM :) 

I would miss the forge though, even though I don't post much, I really get alot out of this place.  So my thanks to Ron and Clinton (and everyone else for making it what it is.)

Dan Sellars.

If I'm not too late to comment on Ron's reply...

This professional attitude he supports is exactly what keeps me coming back to The Forge. Almost all forums fall into disgressions, flame wars, etc. but here I feel there is actually something very useful for innovative game design and (for me at least) understanding more how American players think and their subculture.

I definitely hope the Forge will continue with its "agressive moderation", which took me a while to get to adapt to, but allows for the high quality of the thought exchanges here.

Erick

Best PM experience: people whose games I like saying "hey, you wanna illustrate something I'm doing?" or the like.  Dropping somebody a quick note about something I liked, or wondered, about what they said in a thread, which wouldn't have been topical in a thread.

Worst PM experience:  Nothing bad of significance.

And Then I Ramble: The effect of PMs seems to me to be the creation of a Forge "identity."  I talk to Forge people in email and occasionally even IM or phone, now, but at first everything was in PMs, and it felt like there was a "Forge me" which existed within the confines of indie-rpgs.com, which was its own little sub-self.  Getting rid of PMs in favor of email would dilute that.  Does that matter?  Probably not.

And Ramble A Little More: With PMs, switching from PMs to email or IMs seems like increasing one's level of intimacy, like the switch from formal to informal "you" in French or German.  Going from PM to email takes things past the Forge sub-self into the email sub-self.  Without PMs there would be no middle ground between public discussion on the forge and private discussion which does not involve the Forge in any direct way.  Does that matter?  Probably not.

Like many others I like the idea of having a "send this dude some email, but we're not giving you his email address without his permission" kinda thing.

That's it for me.