Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Moderating of Personal Messages

Pm stands for Personal Messages. If a recipient isn't online, personal messages wait in the member's PM box until the next time he/she logs in and reads and/or deletes them. Personal messages are not private messages.

Forums have become a target for trolls and unwelcomed spam advertisements. Spammers are now using private messages to spread their unsolicited messages and trolls are using forum messaging systems to harass other members. Because of this, many webmasters have had to result to installing a mod that would allow them to read and moderate private messages.

Some computer users believe that this is an invasion of their privacy. However, many computer users are also ignorant to the origins of such software. It is all too easy to rant about these things, without any thought to why mods like this are created by programmers.

Todays-Woman.net is privately owned and operated, and it clearly states in our faq section that personal messages are moderated.

The todays-woman.net community had a case recently where a member was messaging other members to persuade them to leave our community and join theirs.

We make it apart of our policy to check personal messages once a month to ensure that there is no improper activity taking place within the personal messaging system.

I believe that webmasters are within their rights to moderate such activity. It is the way that personal messaging systems are being abused that causes webmasters to moderate such activity.

As long as webmasters make you aware that your personal messages are being monitored, they are within their rights.

That is just my opinion. What’s yours?

Rose DesRochers

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well I totally agree with you my friend I mean it's in the TW Faq ,and plus it helps to make sure no one is solicitating anyone or any trolls are doing anything either.

Moderating them also shows how much you care about your members making sure their time at TW is a pleasant one:)

Steve

Anonymous said...

well of course i agree, i mean... i think the only people who would disagree are the ones who have something to hide. plus its in the FAQ and when you sign up for membership at the site you sign up for all the rules too. otherwise people can abuse the system, sending advertisements etc, as has happened in the past.

Anonymous said...

My feelings on this is that the PM system set up within a website is for business related to the site, if one wants to discuss private matters then they should do it through their own E-mail or with IM's.

When you join a community you are bound by the rules and guide lines set forth. So if you post something just remember that it might be read by someone other than the person to whom it was posted.

There are good reasons for a webmaster to set forth these type of rules, look at the news items that appear daily about the preditors who look for victims in chat areas and it starts to make a lot more sense.