MyBB Community Forums

How many times have you had to write a message to someone, and the message was so short that writing a subject and a message seemed redundant?

e.g.

Subject: Please give me your e-mail address.
Message: Please.

This is absurd.

For me, most of my messages to other users are Twitter-style single sentences. Private messaging is based on an outmoded formal style of communication when most messaging these days is very casual.

Facebook has the right idea by killing subject lines and, instead, showing you a preview of the most recent message.



Now, of course this has its downsides -- for example, looking at Matthew Carlson's message here, I have no idea what the context was for that smiley face. But does it matter?

I'm going to read all the messages I get on my forum. I think most users will. This is not like e-mail where we are constantly being spammed by companies and need subject lines to filter out what information is worth reading and what isn't. These are personal messages, and active users are going to read all of the ones they receive -- or open them at the very least.

Personal messaging, contextually, has more in common with chatting, Facebook messaging, tweeting, than it does with e-mail. Yet forums are still using the outmoded e-mail model for personal messaging. MyBB can be one of the first forums to eliminate this unnecessary inconvenience and modernize the messaging experience.

I think it would only really work if all PMs between users were in a conversation style, like Facebook. Which I think is what you're implying.

I agree if so. Not that I have a major problem with the way it currently works, but if I used PMs more I would probably be more concerned.

Yeah, the downside of this is that messages are threaded by user rather than subject, but I don't think that's a huge deal. If you wanted to you could institute a delay, e.g. if a user contacts you 7 days after your last contact with him, it becomes a new thread.

But then if you were looking for something said between the two of you, how would you know which conversation to look at? :\

I think it would have to be one threaded conversation, just like a thread.

i have been having similar thoughts and only slightly looked into how it can be done as a plugin. from my inital review it would require a custom pm system that intercepts and replaces the default one. however, for 1.8 having that option would be awesome.

Actually, it looks like this has been confirmed (and revealed to the public) for 2.0.

And here I was, trying to hide it.

Come on Ryan I made the thread for a reason!

I know, I just checked it to confirm we had released that information to the public.

When in doubt, I pretend I don't know.

Have subject be an option, if there isn't a subject than show part of the message? Leaving the subject as an option to be empty or not.

I think Subjects are useful. Let's say you get a hundred messages a day. A rather important message was sent to you and the only way is to take notice of that important message is the message truncated in the inbox. What if the message was long?

Obviously it should show a preview of the message.

What if the important message didn't have a descriptive subject? I mean, really, we can come up with hypothetical situations for every use case. What's going to benefit the largest amount of people?

Great news that this will be included in 2.0. Sad that it won't be in 1.8. Hopefully someone will develop a plugin.