Higher (or no) private message limit?

A

andersju

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5:29 AM
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Mar 24, 2005
Messages
410
It'd be fantastic to have the current limit of 100 private messages removed or at least raised. It feels quite frankly a bit ridiculous these days, like somebody thought no more than 100 was a good idea in the days of yore and nobody ever reconsidered. :)

Many boards have no limit at all, and the ones that do tend to have more sensible limits - e.g., 5000 at APUG, 1000 at PentaxForums.

PMs take very little space, disk space is cheaper than ever, and it makes little sense to allow 61 400 KB of images but only 100 messages. My near-full inbox+outbox are together 164 KB when exported to .txt, or 1/374 of the gallery space. I'm sure that adding a zero to the limit would make a lot of people happy, and it would certainly make the classifieds easier to use: no more "your inbox is full" and constantly having to remove stuff (and having to save important messages somewhere else and remember where). And when the classifieds experience is nicer, people are more likely to place ads here, bringing more $ for the upkeep of this fine place. Win-win! :)
 
Well, i understand the point because its a free forum and to run this costs a bit anyway. I usually erase old messages and thats why this aint an issue for me, but i know many people today are not acting this way. Anyway i say the current state is ok and acceptable.
 
I often find myself missing a message that I needed to make use of, but that was deleted due to the 100 limit (sent and received). How about increasing the limit to 100 sent and 100 received?

This would help.
 
Maybe there could be a pay button or donate button on the first page (or have i just missed it?) so there could be an increase for those willing to pay and need the space?
 
i'm not computer savvy enough to know how/if it could work...i know the cost for the site has gone up quite a bit and stephen hasn't given us a raise in ages...;)
 
If we're talking just a message limit increase I think a one-time fee of, say, $5-10 for 3000-5000 messages would be appropriate and popular.

I have 91 messages right now, 164 KB uncompressed plain text when exported. Let's say it's 2 MB (0.002 GB) for 1000 messages - just a very rough ballpark figure. I don't know how much RFF's host (which appears to be Rackspace) charges for extra disk space, but consider the prices at other popular cloud/VPS hosts: $1/month per each extra GB at Linode, $0.10 per GB-month for Amazon EC2's EBS... disk is cheap.

A one-time fee of $5-10 (or $5-10 for each increase) would likely cover quite a few messages, and administration, if it can't be automated. Just a suggestion :) (But again, I don't know the particulars of RFF's hosting deal.)
 
APUG lets users become "Subscribers" by donating money each year (I think its $25 but you can give more if you want), and by doing so they get some things regular free users don't get, like the ability to place classified ads for free. Maybe RFF could do something like that, and include a bigger PM box in the subscriber's account.
 
To get more gallery space is ok, you have to pay for ads nowadays dont you(?) so maybe a possible Extra Gallery space plus free (amount based, maybe 20 ads/year) ads would be one option? But to turn the whole forum to a paid version would kill it, maybe they could survive for 1-2 years just to figure out the crowd is gone.
 
The fees would not be mandatory for all. Similsr to photo.net and other sites, you get additional priviliges for a fee.
 
I wonder what's the percentage of RFF members that max-out their PM memory space?
Personally, I don't use mine at all. Is it possible to reallocate PM memory space? Perhaps reducing the max number of PM's for those of us that don't use the feature while increasing the max for those that do.
 
andersju said:
If we're talking just a message limit increase I think a one-time fee of, say, $5-10 for 3000-5000 messages would be appropriate and popular.

I have 91 messages right now, 164 KB uncompressed plain text when exported. Let's say it's 2 MB (0.002 GB) for 1000 messages - just a very rough ballpark figure. [...]
Click to expand...

Are we really talking about fees for a few more messages? I don't conceive the discussion here, because 10 images of around 200kB seems to be like 1000 standard messages... I'm ready to pay fees for a higher image volume than today (bigger images, more images in the gallery), if this is a an option. But for a few kB of text? :confused:
 
dct said:
Are we really talking about fees for a few more messages? I don't conceive the discussion here, because 10 images of around 200kB seems to be like 1000 standard messages... I'm ready to pay fees for a higher image volume than today (bigger images, more images in the gallery), if this is a an option. But for a few kB of text? :confused:
Click to expand...

I just want to get away from the bizarre 100 message limit. I'd be glad to trade my 62 MB of unused gallery space for more messages, but if paying for it is the only way, then so be it. :)
 
I would suggest that if we want to have longer conversations, just take it to email. The messaging system on RFF and other forums is pretty stone age compared to GMail and the like.
 
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