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Should I Restrict The Ability For New Members To Personal Message?


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I work hard to keep spammers at bay. However, the is one area where I have minimal oversight. A new member can never post, but can start sending personal messages (PMs) immediately. So a spammer can join and send out junk via the PM system with me never being aware of it.

Question 1 - is this actually an issue? Has it happened to any of you?

Question 2 - should I limit the ability of new members to send a PM?

I can install a plugin on the system that prevents a member from sending a PM until they have hit a post limit - say 10 posts made. This forces the person to become visible and known before they can PM. They can of course just spam with 10 quick posts to get the ability to PM, but I am pretty good at spotting that kind of behavior.

There is only one area I can think of where this might present problems. If you do not put contact info in a Classified Ad then only way people can contact you is via the forum. So people may join simply to be able to send a PM to you about an ad. They also can't actually post in the Classifieds without having ten posts elsewhere already, so they can't just reply to the ad in a normal fashion with a post. It would really make only long time forum members able to respond to any ad that is placed without contact information. This might be a good thing or a bad thing I guess.

I have been ignoring this possible issue for a long time, but was just contacted by a member to say a new member was sending them multiple nonsense messages, and not responding to his replies asking for explanation. The account was based in France and maybe a language barrier at work, but I went ahead and deleted (not banned) the account. The person immediately joined again and started with new PMs, so I deleted the account again. I did not ban as I was wanting to see how they responded, and whether they might contact me directly. If they join again I might send them a PM myself, or just ban the account, as something is up with it.

But one last time, is this really a problem at all? I really need some feedback from anyone that has had issues with getting unwelcome PMs from new  members. As far as more established members, there is an Ignore function that allows you to block any single member.

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Hello Steve.

It's really nice how you take care of us. But for now I think there is no need to restrict PMs for new members as everyone has the option to PM B$ via the button. (yes, it is there also in PM)

Personally, I've never had spam or other bad stuff on board here via PM.

But maybe others have had different experiences?

Thanks for your time.

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No problem with new members private messaging me or me sending them a private message so far aside from some new (former) members not taking my advice about how to act on this forum!!!!

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Never had any issues regarding PM,so not a problem this end.

 

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No problems for me but it is always good to have an idea of someone's character after a few real posts.

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I too was contacted by this person in regards of my post in classifieds searching for a particular coil. He sent me a message saying his friend has one and had a contact email available for this so called friend 🙂 . The person who sent me the message had no previous posts so I ignored it. But this was his second message to me in regards to this, the first time I replied with not interested. No need to change a thing, regular forum members should just use logic when suspicious messages are sent. I am betting del norter and I received a message form the same scammer. 

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