My little status thing in the top left corner says I have "2 messages, 2 are new" And yet, when I go to the message center, there are no messages there. Is there a reason for this?

It's starting to make me nervous.

Long, long ago, some spambot sent everybody on the forum two graphic porn spam private messages. Clinton, the tech admin, did a massive brute-force delete on all of them. It got rid of the porn, but it left "2 are new" in almost everyone's private message notification line.

The rule that everybody has to post at least 3 public messages before they get to send private messages dates from that same episode.

No need to get nervous!

-Vincent