As a longtime poster here, I wouldn’t want SDMB moderators trying to contact me if I’ve decided not to post here. It would be IMO intrusive. If I were to suddenly pass away, I wouldn’t want her to have to deal with contact from a message board moderator.
If a poster is interested in contacting me, tagging me in a thread or sending me a PM is the way I’d prefer. If I don’t respond you’ll just have to let it go.
What if I had a name, would you say if it matched the email account without actually giving out the email? By PM, not publicly.
One thing you can do as a poster is start a thread about the missing poster. Often someone else will know that they post on another platform and are just fine. That’s worked for me twice and I’ve seen other instances. There’s also a thread that’s been running a couple of years about missing Dopers that has explanations for why some have left.
Good to know and no reason to really I suppose as members can set up their email notification preferences if they want to remain informed on board topics, read replies or respond to quotes of their @username.
That was my immediate thought. There is a PM function that a concerned person can use on an individual basis for the purpose of a welfare check. If an individual is truly concerned, that individual should make the effort. It shouldn’t be assigned as an automatic SDMB function.
I’d have to look again, but I don’t think email addresses can be made public. You can set it up so you get an email if someone replies to you or sends a PM, but it’s all done by Discourse.
I don’t know of any larger boards that contact missing members. Some of the smaller ones do, but those are places where most everybody knows everybody else.
There’s at least one poster here who I miss, but it’s their choice to stay away, so I won’t bug them.
