Annoying limitation on stored messages

[Peter Knutsen]

It's really annoying, the way private forum messages work. When somebody writes to me, I get an email notification that the username has written to me, but the email does not contain the text of the message, only the name of the sender, and the subject line he chose. You've got mail! and nothing else.

Furthermore, there's a hard limit of 50 stores messages, including received and sent.

This means that whenever the system forces me to delete messages, because I'm close to the limit, I have to manually copy the text of the message, for archiving purposes, and store it on my hard drive. That's very bothersome, to have to jump through such hoops here in 2012. It doesn't feel one bit like TL8.

Why can't the limit be increased for veteran forum users? Say, by another 10 messages per year, after 2 full years as an active user (e.g. as defined by having made at least 3 posts in the given calender year), so that after 4 years the limit is 70, after 7 years the limit is 100, and so forth? It'll cost a ridiculously small amount of server space, but would make the forums much more pleasant to use.

Alternatively, if the notification emails can be improved to contain the body of the message, including sent messages, then there's no need to increase the limit on stored messages. But the current functionality is just stupid and seems to have sprung from a mind thinking in the short term only.

[Þorkell]

Below the PM box there's a thing that says

Download all Private Messages as:
XML | CSV | Text

That at least saves you the bother of copying things manually.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

But the current functionality is just stupid and seems to have sprung from a mind thinking in the short term only.

Actually, I would guess the current functionality comes from the way people used the internet in 2004-ish, where you'd email someone if you wanted to send them a note, and this whole "PM" thing was weird. And server space was significantly more limited.

[Parody]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Actually, I would guess the current functionality comes from the way people used the internet in 2004-ish, where you'd email someone if you wanted to send them a note, and this whole "PM" thing was weird. And server space was significantly more limited.

Heck, I still think this whole PM thing is weird. Why not just send me an email? I don't want to check private messages on 50 different forums and social network sites.

The email that just tells you that you have a message but doesn't include the message is pretty funny, though. :-)

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Actually, I would guess the current functionality comes from the way people used the internet in 2004-ish, where you'd email someone if you wanted to send them a note, and this whole "PM" thing was weird. And server space was significantly more limited.

I suspect its' more the (horrible in my experience) way that vBulletin handles its' database and the limitations of the database it uses.