I made a promise a while ago that private messages would be ready by the end of 2019, and here they are with a few hours to spare (sorry Australia). You can send a message by going to someone's profile and clicking "Send message". Your ongoing conversations will be listed in the Messages dropdown on the navbar. If you want to try it out, feel free to send me a message and say hi (EDIT: I've received some lovely messages so far, thanks everybody 😄).
Please note this is not a chat system, so messages won't appear instantly. They're loaded with every page.
Group conversations are working, however, they're not ready for release yet because we've run into a slight problem that we want to get your feedback on. Currently, there's nothing stopping anybody from inviting anybody else into a group conversation, this could potentially end up in spam groups involving hundreds of thousands of people. So how do we decide who can invite whom into a group conversation? Discord has a friend system but I'm not sure if a friend system is right for this site. I'd love to hear your ideas for how we should go about it, because we'd love to launch group conversations asap.
Security measures already in place are that an account must be 7 days old to send a message, you can report distasteful messages (to be handled by our full mods), and you can block specific people from messaging you.
Future plans for this system include e-mail notifications (including figuring out a way to handle it if hundreds of messages are sent in a short time, because we don't want to bombard people with e-mails), and perhaps reacting to messages (a thumbs up or maybe something like Discord's emote react thingy), and a load button to load more than the most recent 256 messages.
Feel free to leave any feedback or bug reports (I'm sure there will be many).
Happy New Year folks! 🎆
The most anticipated new SRC feature is here at last! Thanks Pac!
I think for group chats the creator should be the only one with invitation permissions. Rather than being inserted into a group chat like discord has when adding people (at least I recall it working that way), you'd receive an invitation notification for accepting or ignoring. Maybe even a message with the notification on why you're being invited to a group DM so one wouldn't have to send an additional personal DM to the person being invited if they don't know why. If it becomes spammy then block that user
I love it. Thanks Pac! Happy New Year to you too :)
I can now message friends very insightful messages, thanks.
Awesome feature! Communities too small to have a discord server will be able to connect much better now.
Quick question: did you handle timezones? Cuz I received a message from 3 hours in the future and it's scaring me
Im really excited for this feature it will make getting rules cleared up easier and make community communication so much easier. Maybe for group messages limit how fast groups may grow, like a cool down period. Ex only 10 invites per minute, except maybe like site mods and things like that? That way no rogue user can invite the entire site by running a comb for usernames. Perhaps make sure the user has at least one submitted run before being able to invite people into groups as well?
Whoa, awesome! See, I knew patience is key. Thank you so much for the continued work, really. 😄
Nice, good job about keeping your promise :D I found a small bug: When you try to submit an empty message, the textarea becomes readonly and you have to reload the page if you want to type something.