Hi,
I have some suggestions regarding personal messages.
My suggestions are based on problems I face managing a 14,000 users website. Some stuff that I have to fight against are: users trying to sell products by PM and companies trying to do marketing research with my users without authorization.
So.. What I suggest for PM is doing restrictions, just like the group permissions. So, depending on the user group, a user will be able (or not) to send/get PM. Even better If we could difine the PM mailbox size depending on the group.
This way I could be able do do something like:
New user groups - Cannot receive or send PM.
Begginers group - Mailbox for 10 PM, but can not send.
Intermediate group - Can send mesages and have a 20 messages mailbox.
And so on...
Also have the personal permission: block PMs access for a specific user.
This would solve my problems... especially the "PM spam".
Another suggestion would be to allow moderadors and/or admins, to have user groups for announcements. So, If we change our forum rules, for example, we could be able to notify all users by PM. Or announce something for a specific group of users (no user groups, but group of pre-selected users.)
This would be much better than trying to email all users, because would not be considered SPAM, would not spend external network resources and would just add some database row, not even a big grow in database size (even because users can delete it latter). The only thing to take care is to disallow any email report for this messages (of course!).