Private messages (PMs) are available to users primarily so that they can share sensitive information with Ask moderators and Replit staff relating to issues they have.
As the community evolved over the past year so did the use of private messages. We have reviewed our strategy for this area and are making some changes to the way private messaging can be used on Replit Ask going forward.
In line with the intended use described above we are now limiting the amount of posts per private message thread to 40 and the maximum number of participants in a private message thread to 5. These are significant reductions from the current default settings but should still allow enough space for a user and moderator / staff member to discuss an issue.
How come you guys didn’t just show up in one of our PMs and say, “Hey, please limit PMs to importand stuff” instead of making them almost useless?
I feel like that’s a bit of an overstatement, as they can still be used for solving issues privately with…support I think. Also I have some questions just because I’m curious, what started the cause for the change? What is the reasoning behind it? From what I read you just said:
But what was the issue? Was it because you said that it’s “primarily so that they can share sensitive information with Ask moderators and Replit staff relating to issues they have”?
From what I understand, pm-ing is a widely used feature on many apps and sites to keep any chats and conversations away from main topics, still letting the people communicate without disturbing main threads. Taking away this is going to make it harder for others to keep things on topic when there’s so many other things users want to convey. I’m absolutely fine with limiting these private messages, as long as there is a clear path for people to communicate without having to worry about going off topic!
The only place I could think of that could even come close is the Repl Chat extension, but there’s hardly any activity on there.
Set a way to let users still privately message each other in groups that isn’t related to moderator-specific purpose and I’m all for it. (I still have to agree nonetheless)
There is a series of PMs known as the Active Member Chat (AMC) which is just a place for the active members of Replit Ask to chat with each other. This action on Replit’s part is to shut down the AMC forever. I haven’t read the recent messages in the AMC so I can’t say with 100% certainty that they weren’t warned, but really I think that the members of AMC would have stopped if the staff had told them too. This response seems drastic to me.
I feel like instead of making a feature to add that, many people want, as its been made apparently clear, their workaround to the predicament is to remove the situation.
It’s almost the equivalent of getting an error from a line of code, and just deleting the code to fix the issue
We gave this some thought bc we wanted to ensure that people would still be able to get support and collaborate with other users in PMs. However, the size and subject matter of some PMs was becoming an outsized moderation burden that distracted us from providing support and assistance to other members of this forum. So PMs are still enabled, just with some new limits. If you find you are hitting limits when getting help, then please let us know and share examples and we can continue to iterate!
I encourage you to take conversations onto Replit if you are collaborating on a repl with others, or to comment on repl spotlights if you’d like to get and share feedback on your projects. The current PM set-up should allow you to still invite people to your repls safely.
How can Replit staff be distracted by PM … or you mean you want people to do your job and support other users and they are getting distracted by chatting? Or you read manually every message ever posted of every form?
Sorry @LenaAtReplit but part of your message is pretty weird.
