Bearhawk Aircraft Bearhawk Tailwheels LLC Eric Newton's Builder Manuals Bearhawk Plans Bearhawk Store

Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Housekeeping for those interested: Disabling "Visitor Messages"

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Housekeeping for those interested: Disabling "Visitor Messages"

    Vbulletin (the software that drives the message board here) is complex with many moving parts. It has gotten much better since we started using it, but there are still some nagging shortcomings that the programmers are either too busy to fix, or too boneheaded to think require fixing. Not sure which case applies here, but either way...

    One such problem area is the "Visitor Messages" vs "Private Messages". Visitor messages are public, anyone can see them. Private messages are private, naturally.

    So say for example you go to visit someone's profile. You'll see this:
    visitor.jpg
    And you'd be totally forgiven for thinking that the text box (where it says "write something") would be the place to write a private message. After all, it says "Private Message" right above that. But where it says "Private Message" is a button, not a title. Unfortunately, there is no title. This page is very poorly designed, and while we have the capability to modify lots of the visual interface easily, this part of the page does not yield itself to easy changes.

    There have been some times where I've seen folks post things there that were probably not intended to be public. Nothing exciting mind you, just probably not intended for public. Over the past few months I've tried a few different methods to curb this, including changing the word "Visitor Messages" to "Public Visitor Messages" in just about every front-facing instance. This doesn't help though, because the profile module (shown above) does not ever use the phrase to label the text box. Frustrating, right?

    Rather than try to take a hatchet to the code to change it (or perhaps break it), for now I've set it up so that users are now not allowed to leave public Visitor Messages for each other. You can still leave one for yourself, if you like talking to yourself. You can still delete any that are on your profile from before today, etc.

    There is hope that a future release of the software might mitigate the terrible design of the profile module, but unless it does, I'm thinking we are better off by just disabling the capability.

    I welcome any objections and am totally willing to be talked out of this change, if the feature is one that you all will really miss, but I think the risk is very large for someone to post something publicly that they meant to post privately, and I feel like we owe it to the members to help eliminate this particular trap.

  • #2
    Since the "private messages" still seem to work fine, I see no issue with your proposal.
    Jim Parker
    Farmersville, TX (NE of Dallas)
    RANS S-6ES (E-LSA) with Rotax 912ULS (100 HP)

    Comment

    Working...
    X