Excuses for turniing off all Personal Messages

xrunner

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Excuses for turniing off all Personal Messages
« on May 20th, 2013, 01:42 AM »
I am a member of a forum that supports the electronic parts, kits, and discussions of a certain company. The forum is phpBB  - not that it matters. They do not allow ANY personal messages. I wanted to PM several members but it frustrated the hell out of me so much that I posted a question about it in their administrative area. The claim was that they turned off the PMs because of "spam" issues. I told them I had never in years been sent spam via a PM, and I run a forum so I would know about this issue.

I proceeded to dump what knowledge I had about spam, which is not too shabby really, but to no avail.

Does anyone here think their excuse for not allowing PMs is a pile of doo-doo? I personally think they are, for some reason, afraid of people communicating with each other in a manner that they cannot see.


Arantor

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Re: Excuses for turniing off all Personal Messages
« Reply #1, on May 20th, 2013, 01:51 AM »
I've had PM spam, on sm.org. I still get people asking for help because they can't read my signature or somehow think it doesn't apply to them, though it's not as bad as it used to be.

I do know that some forums get a lot of PM spam, and that it's actually worse on some platforms than others (phpBB historically had a much higher incidence of PM spam than SMF has, as platforms) but I have no reason as to *why* that should be. Maybe they had a spate of it a while ago and blocked it against future occurrences, which is a valid way to go about things.

More broadly, there is an argument - which is also valid, I'll add - that as the host, they are responsible for content that is on their domain. Businesses are naturally more sensitive to 'liability' and take the view that if they can't see it (like SMF, phpBB frowns on viewing PMs), they could be liable for it if it is illegal, so prevent it. It may be that the spam issue was enough to encourage them to just stop it in all cases.

(Wedge makes it crazy-easy to do so, btw. There's a button to turn off PMs entirely should folks want to do so, but there are reasons why that's there, and they're not for spam.)
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xrunner

  • Posts: 192
Re: Excuses for turniing off all Personal Messages
« Reply #2, on May 20th, 2013, 02:09 AM »
Quote from Arantor on May 20th, 2013, 01:51 AM
I've had PM spam, on sm.org. I still get people asking for help because they can't read my signature or somehow think it doesn't apply to them, though it's not as bad as it used to be.
Well, we all here (probably) know people don't read notices. -_-
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I do know that some forums get a lot of PM spam, and that it's actually worse on some platforms than others (phpBB historically had a much higher incidence of PM spam than SMF has, as platforms) but I have no reason as to *why* that should be. Maybe they had a spate of it a while ago and blocked it against future occurrences, which is a valid way to go about things.
My reasoning to them was that spammers won't waste time PMing each member because it's very inefficient. Better to get an ad in a signature or post so it can be there for all to reach.
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More broadly, there is an argument - which is also valid, I'll add - that as the host, they are responsible for content that is on their domain. Businesses are naturally more sensitive to 'liability' and take the view that if they can't see it (like SMF, phpBB frowns on viewing PMs), they could be liable for it if it is illegal, so prevent it. It may be that the spam issue was enough to encourage them to just stop it in all cases.
If that's the issue then all I ask is of them is honesty - not some lame excuse that spammers are PMing all the members. This is a forum where I know they don't understand how to stop spammers. So I believe they over-reacted at one point in time and went nutters with denying permissions.

Case in point - they used to have a "birthday" list at the bottom of the phpBB forum. Well, as time went on guess what you would see in this list? About ~100 spammer membernames who just happened to have a birthday every day. Go figure. I told them about it and they turned it off but I never got any thanks for it. >:(
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(Wedge makes it crazy-easy to do so, btw. There's a button to turn off PMs entirely should folks want to do so, but there are reasons why that's there, and they're not for spam.)
Well that's good to know, but  don't plan on turning it off. :)

Side question about PMs ...

I know how to read PMs because I've looked into it on my test forum database. I do not read PMs on my main forum. But I do know it's really not that hard to do. Do you personally think that a declaration should be in the registration agreement by default that it's possible that personal messages could be read by Admins who have access to Cpanel? I.e., there is no inherent security of member's PMs?

Arantor

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Re: Excuses for turniing off all Personal Messages
« Reply #3, on May 20th, 2013, 02:13 AM »
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My reasoning to them was that spammers won't waste time PMing each member because it's very inefficient. Better to get an ad in a signature or post so it can be there for all to reach.
I have had spam PMs; it certainly has been known. But it tends to be human driven rather than automated.
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If that's the issue then all I ask is of them is honesty - not some lame excuse that spammers are PMing all the members.
It may well have been the case that they had a glut of PM spam - it hasn't happened to *you* but it *has* happened to sites I know. And if they don't know how to stop spammers, it's even more likely that they would do something like that - stop the symptoms not the problem.
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About ~100 spammer membernames who just happened to have a birthday every day. Go figure. I told them about it and they turned it off but I never got any thanks for it.
Yup. I would expect nothing less from a crowd that doesn't know how to fix problems but only treat symptoms.
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Do you personally think that a declaration should be in the registration agreement by default that it's possible that personal messages could be read by Admins who have access to Cpanel? I.e., there is no inherent security of member's PMs?
It's probably not a bad idea.