New message interchange system

You've probably noticed a new tab in your profile page recently.



So, what's this about? It's a significant update to our message interchange system. Read more...

Some of you could've once or more faced a problem of inappropriate use of our personal messaging system, i.e. threats, spam or dirty language.

We've decided that the system is far too simple to solve this problem, so we changed its structure and added some features to avoid such things to happen to our users.

Since threats, spam and swearing are against our rules, and most of them usually come from persons you contact for the first time, a natural thing to do is to make these first conversations public and accessible from user's profile by default. Thereby, such actions will be able to meet relevant and righteous reaction.

But it doesn't mean these measures should affect the whole privacy of personal messages. Therefore we added a possibility for users to confirm their mutual confidence and make their further conversation private. This is what we named "Trusted users". You may propose other users to make you their trusted partner and confirm or decline their requests to do so, thereby controlling the privacy of your messages.

So there is how your contacts list will be looking:



These sections are: the list of requests from the users who want to exchange private messages with you; the list of users with whom your conversation could be private, and the list of users all the messages to and from who will be public and visible on your and their profile pages. Here also you can manage the incoming and outgoing invitations to "trusted users" group.

Conversations in itself will look pretty much the same, except of their privacy status will be pointed out by color and marks like this:



If you and your partner are mutually trusted, it's fully up to you, whether to send the message privately or publicly. In the mean time, there will be no such option for a user you haven't accepted as trusted.

Important note: None of your existing messages will be published.

And this is how the public messages list will look on one's personal page:



As you can see, they are just like the message threads you probably already got used to, but visible to everyone. So the facts of offensive language, threats or spam will no longer remain unpunished, nor the users should claim without proof anymore, that they were offended by anyone or, for example, were never warned by experienced users of their mistakes.