Easy if you know where it is, I guess. My point still stands: the vast majority of vbulletin board owners do not offer unlimited PM space.
This sounds like an argument for a more robust website.
[quote=“choie, post:53, topic:614608”]
[ul][li]No ads. None.[/li]
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[li]Did I mention no ads? Because that cannot be stressed enough[/li]
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[li]No ads. Seriously. It’s worth it just not to get the frikkin’ ads, especially the noisy ones or most especially of all, the virus-laden ones.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
There are ways that even non-“members” get this privilege as well.
My point is that even if you don’t know where it is, it’s in an obvious location. And anyway, someone was able to find it because they were able to change the default for members and charter members to 200 before.
…only if resources were unlimited, which they are not. Besides, the software is provided by vBulletin, not Creative Loafing.
If anything it’s an argument for a MacArthur Fellowship – but I noted that upthread. And even in that event, improving functionality for Game Room denizens is tangential to the board’s core mission, which is fighting ignorance and making wisecracks.
That said, I don’t know the risks of making such adjustments. I do suspect that the IT department has better things to do.
If it were the case that more pms would adversely affect the board, I would expect the administration to ask people to clean out their pm inboxes in previous instances of board instability. But they haven’t so they must not feel it will have an appreciable difference in how the board runs.
It’s 2012, we shouldn’t have to put up with bullshit technical restrictions that haven’t kept up with the times. If you assume each PM takes 1KB to store, then a whopping 100,000 of them would be 100MB which, given the marginal cost of storage space these days, should cost about a penny. Even at minimum wage, that’s about 5 seconds worth of time. Even if these estimates are off by an order of magnitude, we’re still talking trivial figures.
Asking people to spend valuable time manually deleting messages so that the board can save a minuscule fraction of a dollar is disrespectful and short sighted. Having other users berate the OP for having the temerity to ask for sane defaults is Stockholm Syndrome in action.
Other than the people playing games, this doesn’t seem to be a problem for anyone but the OP. I think that was the point of the “abuse”.
To be honest, if people get the kind of reaction I got when making a helpful suggestion, and with most posters having more expierence on the board than I do, then just because no one has spoken up doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It can just mean they don’t fancy having an argument, and so either they put up with it in silence or leave in silence.I probably wouldn’t have started the thread had I know what some of the responses would be like. Stockholm syndrome is exactly right. Oh, and a few people here have already said they have saved the messages as text files and deleted them… I mean - wtf? How is that not a problem?
It doesn’t illustrate that, though. It just illustrates that compared to SDMB google has unlimited resources.
Google also doesn’t make you wait 2 mins (or whatever it is now) between searches. That doesn’t mean searches are basically free now and that SDMB can eliminate the wait. It just means google has a lot more invested in their infrastructure so that they can handle the more frequent searches without crashing and burning.
Firstly, I will refrain from commenting on what I think about the serach restrictions.
But secondly - searching is a gazillion times more complicated than just having space, which is presumably all a private message needs. You can’t compare the two things.
I think you need to look at your OP, if that’s your version of a helpful suggestion. It was pretty aggressive and at parts, rude. People were reacting, at least in part, to your tone.
We were talking about “the vast majority of forums”.
But whatever. I’ve typed far more words than my interest in the topic warrants. No idea why. But I’m not interested enough to debate it, so I’ll bow out.
This is the first I’ve heard of this.
If the game players had come to us and said they needed more, we’d most likely give 'em more. But nothing was said.
I’m sorry it was taken that way, cause it certainly wasn’t meant to be!
Just a guess, but maybe they were worried about being shouted down by other (well-meaning no doubt) dopers.
I’m pretty sure that you can’t just give them to the game players unless you let them have their own special User Group. Creating a special user group and then selecting who gets to be in it and then putting them in it individually would be a tedious job that would take a while. I am dubious that this would have happened in practice.
To add to that thought… How would you even determine fairly who is considered a game player and therefore gets more messages than everyone else? What if the game player was a Guest? It’s totally impractical.
Unless you meant to say that you hadn’t considered game players when you originally set the limit so that’s why it was so low, then you have a fair point. The only reasonable way to solve that problem would be to increase it for everyone or for all paid members.
I distinctly remember PMing you about this very issue back when P2P was taken down and my membership ran out. I can’t prove it, because if I did, I’ve definitely deleted the PM by now because I ran out of space.
I’m not posting to pick on you- you seem genuinely surprised it could be taken badly. Look at the title. You all-capped MASSIVELY. That usually means yelling. Rather than asking if there is a reason, or if there is a way to increase it you don’t know about, you tell us “it’s utterly ridiculous” and “no sane reason” etc. You inform/lecture the staff about what the situation is (cost nothing to increase storage) rather asking if that’s the case.
It’s not a nice way to offer a helpful suggestion or ask for help.
I really don’t think you meant it to be rough, but perhaps you can see how it was.