Attachements in privates messages.

[ggauny@live.fr]

Hi,

I wonder why it seems not allowed to put an attachement in private message ?
May be I don't understand somethings.

Thanks

Gérard.

[matthiaspaul]

I don't know why Dave has disabled them, but I can tell you why I disabled attachments to personal messages in my forum:

- The basic idea of a forum is to exchange information in public. As more people are involved, questions receive more thorough and more accurate answers, and the answers are preserved so that people who will run into the same question later on (in a couple of days or in decades) don't have to ask the same question again. With snippets of older discussions being actively cross-referenced in newer threads, or old threads being maintained as new information becomes available, the community will over the years almost effortlessly create a shared and continually growing knowledge pool alongside the discussions - for the benefit of both groups, those who seek and those who provide information, the discussions will be of higher quality and with less individual time necessary to spend. This idea is defeated if a significant portion of the communication takes place behind the scenes (except for stuff that needs to be kept private, of course). This is why forum maintainers typically encourage discussions to take place in public rather than only in personal mails, and not making PMs more attractive than necessary for a basic exchange is one measure to achieve this.

- Even with reasonably sophisticated anti-spam measures in place, spammers and other criminals will sometimes succeed in registering in a forum. PMs are often abused to distribute SPAM. If PM attachments are enabled, it is possible to send malware as well. In order to protect the other users, it is therefore a good idea to disable PM attachments. (In my forum, established users who actually need PM attachments for a community-oriented purpose like some project work, will be granted this right on request, but it remains disabled by default.)

- Attachments consume considerably more storage space on the server than text, and PM attachments are no exception, although only one or two persons can benefit from them (compared to when the attachment is public). This may be a particular issue for forums running on non-dedicated servers with little storage space or limited backup facilities, or on very large forums with several ten-thousands of users.

- Some simple forum software implementation do not support PM attachments, but AFAIK this isn't the case with MyBB (the software used to run this forum).

It is likely that Dave had similar reasons not to enable PM attachments by default.

Greetings,

Matthias

[Dave Hicks]

There has been a suggestion of such a feature for a future version of myBB but it hasn't been implemented or promised so far. I just checked several other forums that I use and they don't have that feature either. (Whether by forum choice or lack of feature, I don't know.)

[ggauny@live.fr]

Hi,

Thanks to all. I understand arguments.

Gérard.