PM to multiple addressees is not apparent when received

[#1]

If a PM is sent to A, B and C when A views it, there is no indication it also went to B and C and consequentially no means of replying to ALL.

[#2]

I agree this would be a very useful feature. It may also be a consequence but there is no way of knowing, that I can see, if a message sent to multiple recipients has been read by each recipient.

[#3]

Read status has been a bit muddled.  Initially sent PMs remained bold until read.  Then that vanished, under an obscure Lithium change with the claim that where multiple addressees are involved it's all rather ambiguous if some have and some have not read the PM.

On staging the emboldening of unread PMs is back ... so either ...

• its now fixed
• ambiguity is not now the issue it is
• the change in live is not on staging

Given a number of things we have seen happen in live but not on staging my confidence in what is / is not the correct (latest) functionality is not uplifted any.

[#4]

Current behaviour on staging is that PMs to a single addressee are highlighted until read (which is useful). However PMs to multiple addressees are not marked. As sender I can see all the "To" addressees; Hopefully in due course I'll find out what recipients see.

Edit: One of the addressees has read my multi-addressee PM on staging and responded that no indication was given that there were muliple addressees (and no Reply All). In addition I got no indication that the PM had been read.

I imagine the "To" line was present but has been suppressed to save screen space. OK for single "To" but not multi.

[#5]

There is some functionality for sending 'group' messages that we aren't currently using to its full extent but I know what you mean by the absence of seeing who else was sent the same message.. makes you feel like you were the only one that was sent the message when it was actually sent to multiple users

I think the PM functionality is still in its infancy on this platform so there are some traditional functions that you'd expect to see which are missing. These are some valid points about the PM component that I personally would also like to see... but I am not able to implement these features; I would need to raise it with Lithium as an idea. Luckily for me, the ideas we come up with here that I ask about get a lot of attention and I have had two ideas accepted (one of them being the ability for mods to remove a spammers PMs from users inboxes).

So lets put these ideas into a list of things that we would like to see and I will present this to Lithium on their ideas board:

• Extend the recipients input to have multiple recipients displayed for the person reading the message sent to them
• Have a 'reply' and 'reply to all' button included
• Have a 'forward' button so it would open the message as a normal reply, remove the recipients and update the subject to have FW: in it
• Possibly even have a CC and BCC input as well so you can send a message to your intended users but include others as an FYI kind of thing
• Extend the 'sent' messages folder to show which users have read the message you have sent (with an option to turn this on/off on an individual basis for privacy reasons)
• Include file attachments (like posts) to a private message but also have this based upon the role granted to the user (restrict it for some user groups)

Is there anything else you can think of that would useful for the PM component to be extended?

[#6]

Hi Jack,

Thats a sensible list, though it includes a mixture of fix what's not working and add new functionality.

For the moment I'd settle for fix that which is clearly stupid - if a PM has been sent to multiple users then on reading the PM that should be transparent.  Thereafter the other things become nice to have / work like email.

[#7]

I'd like to see the ability for higher ranking members to be able to send attachments within PMs including zip files and tarballs.

[#8]

I have considerable reservations about allowing attachments in emails PMs. I feel that if such materials are being exchanged email is a far better medium. Potentially we are talking about binary data here and databases are not well suited to handling this data.

Edit: Change emails to PMs in first line.

[#9]

Largely dependant on the back-end database @spraxyt  Many databases cope with BLOBS (Binary Large Objects)  Not sure what Lithium uses?

[#10]

I think BLOB storage is likely to be standard these days. In fact I expect images included in posts (which are binary data) will be stored as a BLOB in an images directory.

What I meant was that this Community forum is a collection of textual posts and a PM is a private type of textual post. Large binary files have no place in this.

[#11]

That's a fair comment @spraxyt but that only works when you have an email address to use. I think for convenience sake that attachments in PMs are useful. The back end storage is already in place as posts can have attachments and most databases that I know of BLOB data is actually stored on the file system.

OK, some might argue there is the possibility of being sent a virus, but the doesn't really hold water if you can email it. As I suggested in my OP this ability would be for privileged users, so in order to send one would need to be of an applicable or higher ranking.

[#12]

the default is to have email address hidden but whether this still allows you to have an email sent to you I don't know but I think it shouldn't as I certainly don't want to receive unsolicited emails

[#13]

Having the abilty to include attachments to PM's in a similar way to how normal posts work is a good idea but it isn't something the system can do right now. Looking at the permissions surrounding PMs there is no mention of attachment priveleges so this can't be done. Another idea to add to the list though.

[#14]

And about the conversation around sending email to each other: everyones email is hidden from each other and the only way this would work is if you actually willingly give your email to someone to send attachments/messages so I don't see why that would be an issue with how private messaging works.