The Big "How To" Archive

Private Messaging Tutorial

With private messaging, you can send a message to another forum user, without having to worry about anyone else seeing it. There are several options that you can choose, such as whether or not you get a notification email when someone sends you a private message (PM), or you can choose to block certain users from sending you messages. There are also certain obstacles that may prevent you from sending a user a message. All these will be discussed in this tutorial.

Contents:
Sending your message
Obstacles
Settings
Managing your messages
Other Private Messaging Things

Sending your message

When you want to send a message to a user of the forums, you first need to click on the "Messages" tab, which will appear at the top of any page of the forum while you are logged in. You then need to look for the sidebar on the left side of the screen. It will look like this:

Choose the "New message" option and it will take you to another screen, this is where you can type in your message, your recipients username, and the subject of the message. Here's what it will look like:

In the "To" and "Bcc" boxes, you can type in the names of the members you want to send the message to. You can send a message to more than one member by typing in the names separated by commas.

In the subject box, you can type in the subject of the message. This is the title of your message, and will appear above the message in the recipient's inbox.

Below that is the area that you can type your message into. This works exactly the same way as replying to a post. If you need help with that there's a reply tutorial on that as well. The send and preview buttons do exactly that, either send your message or show you a preview of it to make sure you're sending what you think you're sending.

The last thing here is the check box labelled "Save a copy in my outbox". Checking this will save a copy in your outbox for future perusal. You can see your outbox by clicking the link to it on the sidebar, just underneath the "New message" link.

You may also be asked to provide verification that you are a human if you haven't made a certain number of posts yet, (30 I think) This is to prevent someone making an account and having it automatically spam everyone on the forums. If this occurs, just type in the characters it displays in the box provided.

Obstacles

There are a few things which may prevent you from sending the message when you click on the send button. I'll show the ones I've encountered here, and how to deal with them.

As you can see, you must have some message to send, and somebody to send it to, because sending nothing to people is useless, and so is sending stuff to nobody. To fix this, you need to have message contents, as well as at least one person that you are sending the message to.

Here it says it can't find the member in question. However, I'm certain it exists, because I created that account, and it's in the members list. So what's going on here? Recall that you can enter multiple users by separating the names with commas. In this case it thinks we're trying to send the message to two separate users, "Avast" and "Mateys". You can fix the problem of users with special characters in their names by enclosing the name in quotation marks. If we entered "Avast, Mateys" in the recipient box, it will send properly.

Here we have a fairly obvious problem, the user has blocked your message. The only way to get around this is to ask them to unblock you, and wait to see if they do.

Settings

Here we turn from sending messages to determining how you receive them. To do this, click on the "Profile" tab. it's up at the top of the page, right next to the "My Messages" tab. Once you've clicked it, it will bring up your profile summary. On the left side of this page is a sidebar, which will look like this:

Click on the "Personal Message Options" link at the bottom of this sidebar. It will open up the page where you can change how you receive messages, people that you want to block from sending messages to you, and other options. It will look like this:

The first and biggest thing on here is your ignore list. If you wanted to block me from sending you messages for example, you would type in "The Camo" in the box. If you wanted to block someone else as well, you would enter their username on another line. In this case, all that is entered in the box is an asterisk. This character is often used as a wildcard, and here it blocks anyone from sending you messages. This happens to be the ignore list for my sock puppet, Avast, Mateys, and this is the reason I got that last error message. Also, you can still send messages to a user you have blocked.

The second thing you can change is the settings in those numbered lines there.
1. This will save messages in your outbox by default, surprisingly enough. This allows you to see them later on if you want to.
2. This will generate a popup that tells you when you have a message that hasn't been read yet. Otherwise it just places a bolded number on the messages tab to tell you how many unread messages you have.
3. Here you can set whether or not to have an email sent to the address you provided when you registered. If you choose this, remember that you can't reply by sending an email back, you have to log into the forums and use the reply button in the upper right corner of the message in your inbox.

When you're happy with the settings, click the "Change Profile button in the lower right corner and it will apply the settings.

Managing your messages

After you have been sent messages, they will appear in your inbox. Once this has occurred, you have several options as to what to do with them. These options include sorting, deleting and replying.

The Inbox
To get to your inbox, click the "Inbox" link on the sidebar. You will have a list of the messages you have been sent, as well as some options as to what to do with them. If you scroll down the page, you will get to see the content of the messages, instead of just the subject that is displayed in the list of messages. When you have been sent a message, it will look something like this:

Hopefully it won't actually be that message, so don't annoy me until I send you one of them. Tongue

Ignoring the contents for now, notice two important things about the message. First of all, notice the Quote, Reply and Remove links in the top right. Also notice the "Label Message" box in the lower right corner.

The "Quote" and "Reply" links work much the same way as they do on messages in the forum. The Quote link will give you the send message screen with the name of the person who sent you the message in the "to" box, and a quote of the original message in the message box. The reply link will do the same thing, but won't add the quote of the original message. The "Remove" link on the other hand, will delete the message, so don't click it unless you never want to see the message again. (in this case, I don't think I do Wink

)

The "Label Message" box won't appear unless you've created some labels for messages, so I'll tell you about that next.

Labels
Labeling messages allows you to sort them into separate folders, so you don't have to go looking through your inbox and have to sort the relavent stuff out from the rest of the messages.

To do this, go to the sidebar, and click on "Manage Labels" towards the bottom of the sidebar. You will get a screen with two sections. First you will want to add a label, so type in the name of your label in the lower section, like this:

Click on the "Add new Label" button, and you will now have a new folder that you can put messages into. Notice how the sidebar has changed as well, it now has a new section in the middle called "Labels" and will look something like this:

Clicking on these will take you to the folder, which will be set up in the same way as your inbox. It will have a list of messages at the top and the messages themselves further down. If you want to change these labels, or delete them you can do that from the first section of the "Manage Labels" page. It should look something like this:

You can change the names of labels by clicking on them and typing in the new name. This will not change the contents of the folder. You can also delete labels. To do this, check the boxes next to the labels you want to remove and click the "Delete Selected" button. This will remove the folder and any messages in it. If you have copies of those messages elsewhere, they won't get deleted. When you are finished editing/deleting your labels, click on the "Save" button to save the changes

Once you have some labels, you can sort messages into them by using the drop down menu at the bottom right of either the list of messages, or the message itself.

As you can see, we have the option to either remove the selected message from the inbox, add it to the folder "tests", or we can delete it entirely by using the "Delete Selected" button. If it was already in the tests folder, we would have to options to either remove it from the inbox, or remove it from the tests folder.

Searching
Searching your messages is fairly simple. To do this, go to your "My Messages" tab, then click the link on the sidebar that says "Search messages". You will be taken to a page that looks somewhat like this (I've moved things around here a bit) :

In the first box, the one labeled "Search for:" type in what you want to search for. There will be a dropdown box next to that where you can specify whether or not you want to match all the words you typed in, or have it give you results that contain just one or a few of the words as well. In the box labeled "By user:" you can specify whose messages you want to see in your results. Here, as in the ignore list, you can use the asterisk as a wild card.

Below these is the Options section. The two checkboxes allow you set whether or not you show the full message, or just the subject in the results. If you chose to only show the subject, you can click on the subject and it will show you the rest of the message. Next to that is the age section, where you can tell the search to ignore all results that are not in a given range of days ago. For example, if you wanted to search for only messages that you received in the last two weeks, you would change the 9999 to a 14.

Below this is a dropdown menu that allows you to choose whether you display the most recent messages at the top of your results list, or at the bottom.

If you have any labels set up, you can click the red button, which will turn blue expand to give you the list of checkboxes like the one shown above. selecting or deselecting these will allow you to choose to search in certain folders and not others.

When you're happy with your search criteria, just click on the search button, and it will take you to a list of your results.

Pruning
Should you decide that you don't really want any messages past a certain point in time, there's an easy way to get rid of them without hunting through all your folders looking for ones past that point, and deleting them individually. It's called pruning, and you can access it through the sidebar in the "My Messages" tab, and clicking on the link labeled "Prune Messages". It will take you to a page that looks like this:

Simply enter the number of days that you want to keep messages from, and click the "Prune" button. This will delete all messages that are older then the number of days you entered. This will not continue happening though, you have to go back and redo it whenever you want to do this again.

Other Private Messaging things

There are a few options that haven't been covered yet relating to private messaging. Those will be covered here.

To change the ordering of the messages in your inbox, go to the "Profile" tab, click on the sidebar link that says "Look and Layout Preferences", and select or deselect the checkbox with the label "Show most recent personal messages at top." This will reorder your inbox so that the most recent messages are shown at the top, and you won't have to scroll all the way down the page to find them.

If you aren't sure about the spelling of a member's name, or can't be bothered with typing it into the "To" box, you can go to the "Members" tab, find their name, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on "Send this member a personal message".