Well, I don’t know if my experience is typical – for all I know, all the other Dopers are out there partying without me, and they all shrink away in horror from my posts but feel too sorry for me to say so – but assuming for a moment that it is typical, I’ve been a member since 2005 and IIRC the two examples in my original post were the first times I had spontaneously attempted to initiate contact outside the boards with any one (I think there may have been one instance where I initiated contact because a poster said “PM me if you want more info” so I did).
As for people spontaneously contacting me, in 3 years I’ve probably had 5-6 posters PM me about something, usually a specific question that we resolved in 2 or 3 exchanges.
So, I think it is fairly safe to be “visible.” OTH, I live so far away from all the other posters (as far as I know there is one other poster in Indonesia, and that person is a long, long way from me) and that gives me a sense of security I would not have if I lived in, say, Chicago. I’d probably at least consider blocking PMs and emails if I lived in a major American city.
Yeah, I’m completely reassured by this thread–which is why I decided to wander in when it started. Even the dysfunctional places would send off a certain vibe I’d now recognize if I posted what I did here. Not that plonking down 15 and then deciding to bail is the end of the world, but I am strongly thinking of plonking down the if the board doesn’t go to free posting, so this thread was nice timing from my perspective.
I can definitely see where being geographically far from most posters would add a feeling of security. I guess I don’t really worry about the safety aspect, though, if it’s just PMs, since I am in a major American city. There are so many millions of people here, and I feel just as safe on message boards as I do on city buses.
I did get badly burned once by someone who was interested in meeting me in person, however. I wasn’t hurt, but they scared the crap out of me. So much so that I stayed off the internet entirely for a good six months. If they had truly intended to hurt me, they could have, because I was an idiot and thought that because I had exchanged a lot of emails with them I knew them. Ever since then, I’ve not really been interested in being more than aquaintences with anybody on the net.
My experience matches that of the others. I’ve only recieved 8 PMs since I’ve been here, and three of them were responses to something I’d written. I’ve found that, for the most part, you don’t really attract drama/e-pals/whatever unless you’re looking for it around here. I think the average age of posters on the SDMB skews higher than most message boards, and so the maturity level does, too (relative to other forums, of course ).
I don’t block PMs, but I hide my email address because I like to be cautious about who I give it out to. I’ve had too many addresses hit spam lists and become unusable to throw it about freely.
But I accept PMs and have gotten perhaps 20 in the last 2 years. Two conversations that started on PMs then moved to e-mail for simplicity. You can be notified by e-mail that you’ve got a PM. Works for me.
A couple of nice people what notified me by PM that I might be needed or want to respond to something in a thread that I hadn’t noticed. That’s something I really like about the SDope community, although I also like that it is very very infrequent - perhaps once a year.
If you set the notification, it will alert you any time you use the **User CP ** button or **New Post ** button and I believe in several others ways, like opening a forum to glance through it.
This is the description from Edit Options
Check off the option to get the Notification.
Additionally, if you glance to the upper right hand of nearly any SDMB screen you are on, under your Welcome, username it shows:
You last visited: Today at 08:35 AM
Private Messages: Unread 0, Total 42.
So you can see if there are any Unread PMs at a quick glance.
It is a very useful feature and far more seamless then AIM or even counting on most Emails.
That description matches me. I have subsequently reinstated the visibility of my email address, but have in the past hidden it as I have been on the receiving end of abusive emails from members here on more than one occasion.
PM’s came in handy when my sister (also a Doper) was in Ireland. She couldn’t always access her email account to contact me, but she could always access the Dope. We did most of our communicating via PM while she was away.
I think I have my hotmail account listed, which is what I use for most of my message boards and similar stuff but I don’t check that email daily. I have an email that I do check daily that I use for family, close friends and some bills but I’d rather not have that one on the web. So I guess if people only have one email account they’d probably rather not have it available to everyone on the web.
I have PM’s enabled but I rarely get any and may not notice right away when I do. I don’t see any big deal with having PM’s enabled so I have no idea why everyone doesn’t have theirs enabled.
Same here. I turned my email visibility off once because of unkind emails related to a thread that I’d started. I expect that this is quite common. There’s a lot of SDMB-related activity behind the scenes, and not all of it is pleasant.
A hopefully not obscure analogy.
Being an armchair genealogist, I’ve written armfuls of snail mail (SASE) to second, third and beyond cousins, knowing who many of their ancestors were, with interest in aquiring new bits, personal anecdote, perhaps old photos.
The return rate is less than .5% *. My guess is the putative ancestor is simply too tenuous a link to establish connection.
The returns produce a feeling like peeing your pants without the damp and stinky
).
