Just noticed it for the first time a second ago. I always thought the PTB were staunchly against it, much like the edit feature. It was said to be murder on the hamsters.
Can avatars be far behind?
I am curious … what has changed uphill to suddenly allow new features? Something is obviously very different now about the SDMB. Are there more SDMB-friendly folks in charge at the Reader or something? Seemed a few years ago, they were ready to pull the plug on this place without a second thought. Now we’re getting some extras, even. Cool, but puzzling.
It’s a new server. Not sure how you missed all the announcements about it, but it’s been around a little while now. Private messaging came at the same time as editing.
When we moved to the new server a month or two ago, they decided to turn some features on to see how well they’d work in the higher-power environment. RSS feeds were found to have a strong negative impact, so those were subsequently turned off, but PMs didn’t seem to cause a problem, so we kept them.
bordelond, have you noticed we now have a five minute Edit feature now also. After years of some of us annoying posters begging for some of the various features, they were nice enough to try it out. It looks like both are here to stay.
Purely a semi-educated guess on my part: I think we are now welcomed citizens as the board gives every appearance of at least paying for itself and Jerry’s time that he spends on maintaining the SDMB. We might even be a small source of revenue now with the Google Ads.
Again only my conjecture and I was not here 3 years ago.