So since there’s been a few threads discussing the forums recently, it occurred to me that this place is still lacking some basic features found on like 99% of other online forums (which are free/don’t cost $15 per month to access)… like a “private message” user-to-user messaging system
I think even most early forums in the 1990’s already came “standard” with a private messaging system. And it was certainly standard across-the-board by the 2000’s
It would definitely be nice to have an in-house private messaging system (…like the vast majority of other online forums already do) where you could message a specific poster away from prying eyes to talk 1-on-1, share a link, share contact info, etc etc
I frequent a decent variety of forums - everything from a car forum, to a health-related forum, to Reddit, to a self-improvement forum, to a crypto forum, to a “headline news” discussion forum, to Facebook, etc… and every single one (regardless of the subject matter) has an in-house private messaging system
I disagree about having a PM. If I wanted to PM someone, I would just request to be friends with them then send a message via BNet. But that is my own opinion.
That depends on them accepting the invite though, you left that part out (pretty big flaw). On 99.99% of online forums you can simply message the other poster directly
Over on reddit I message people 1-on-1 pretty regularly and it’s just such a nice feature to have…
When I have a question, need advice, or want to ask for specific details from an interesting poster (…reddit has quite a few), nothing quite beats the privacy of that 1-on-1 conversation format provided by a PM system
Discourse forums have a messaging system, but Blizzard left it out for a reason. The amount of extra moderation that would be required is likely not worth it when you can literally just message someone in-game.
At this point I’m in favor of them completely shutting down all of their official forums entirely since they can’t be bothered to moderate them properly.
No thank you. Given how nasty troll threads can get at times, DMs would be 1000 times worse. People can be downright awful when they think they’re being private or anonymous.
This is also flawed/has it’s problems, because it depends entirely on them being online/playing at the same times as you
Plenty of interesting forum posters seem to play at odd/weird times… even though I see them posting a bunch on here I never seem to “catch” them actually online inside the game
With a simple PM inbox they can simply read your message whenever and get back to you whenever (…or just ignore it or delete it, if they choose)
Only way I’d be on board with it, is if we had a thorough array of privacy options to limit who can send us messages - or some ability to have message requests approved or denied first.
Otherwise, I’d never support a PM system on a public video game forum. Especially not ones like WoW’s, where the lack of a BTag system lets people make tons of throwaway characters to spam, troll, and avoid Ignores/Blocks with.
