u2u is the personal message system on the old forum, which basically everyone seems to prefer. people post their addresses a lot because they think they’re sending a message when they’re just replying to a topic.
i think the one on this forum is fine, i just miss the folders. and the easy deleting. like if i delete myself from a pm does the other person notice? does the message also delete on their page? i just want a bin. and folders to create.
also. when i’m on my phone i can’t see who the sender is. which is not easy when you have several swaps with the same topic titel.
Yes - the other person doesn’t get a notification but if they check the thread, there is an additional message from “the system” - “XXX has removed themselves from the conversation”.
No, the other person still sees the entire conversation. Even if both people remove themselves, the message still stays in the archives of the forum.
According to the Community guidelines we have to write in English (unless we post in the #communities or #meetups sections.
Quote: “English is the official language of the forum, and this language should be used throughout the forum — except on the Language and Geographical communities, and on the Meetups sections.”
firstly, thank you for seriously answering, i had no idea. secondly. this makes me kinda feel guilty for removing myself from pms. which i only do because i can’t put them in folders. i always delete the ones where the cards have arrived, it’s my system of keeping track of swaps and all (so nothing personal, anyone).
I felt guilty at first, too, but a fair few members do it and only one person has ever asked me about it. Mostly because I left a couple of RR message threads that I’d already send the cards and they were being a good RR host to make sure I was okay.
I never remove myself from PMs, I prefer to put them into the archive (for completed swaps or RR groups for example) but I have seen examples in my messages, so that is how I know what happens. Bin would be quite useful but if the message stays anyway, I prefer to be able to access it myself
No need to feel guilty, it’s a totally acceptable way to keep the inbox more orderly.
I was doing this, too, but I thought I heard somewhere only a max of 200 messages can be kept? I could be totally wrong, but if it is the case…what happens when you reach 200…do you not receive new messages or do the oldest get auto deleted to make room?
On the old forum, there was a limit of 200 for the U2Us but from what I know, here the storage is unlimited. I’m not even close to the threshold, however, so can’t really test it right now.
I’m confused… this forum is about 60 million times more active than the old one (and takes so much more of my time…ahem…). Of course there are people who don’t use forums, they might have no time or interest. If there is a language barrier, that doesn’t change with the forum platform (unless automatic translation is easier in some rather than others, I don’t know).
I just assumed that this forum is so much more active because it is, in my opinion, a lot easier to use, and it doesn’t require a different registration as the one to the main site is sufficient. There are so many newbies!
Mind you, I am not so bad with technology, I just felt the old one was so outdated, I said it many times, I was on forums like that in the early 2000s, 20 years ago! People who use social media a lot should find this easier…
I don’t do a lot of swaps so to me the old U2U system was one of the most baffling, cumbersome, old-fashioned nonsense you could think of. It took me ages to figure out how to reply to a message, it was so counterintuitive. I hated that it opened in another window, and the typing window was tiny and it took me ages to find out it could be enlarged (probably due to the fact that I didn’t use it very often). In the new messaging system, it is a bit annoying that the message window is so similar to the main forum, but other than that, in my opinion it is an improvement of enormous proportions.
@mchay, what @delenn_mir writes, this is correct.
You will see a sign and note in your inbox that someone has removed themselves with regard to the conversation
If someone sends you a message, you should get a notification. You can see your notifications by clicking on your icon in the top right corner. Then you will see 4 different icons: a bell, a bookmark, an envelop and a little person. Click on the envelop and you will see the messages that people have sent to you.
I don’t get it lol. I miss the inbox on the old forum. It was so much less confusing to use to me because it looked like regular email whereas here it looks too much like the rest of the forum. And mine wasn’t tiny. Also, I don’t like that it’s not possible to “stay” in the inbox. If I click on a message and then want to click on another one, I have to do the process again to get to my inbox instead of just clicking on the back button.
I have not used the old U2U system, so I can’t compare. But when I click the envelope symbol twice to get into the “messages” (in-box), I can “stay” there reading messages. If I click the envelope just once, it shows the message notifications (which do work as shortcuts to each message shown, but one can’t return to the list with one click).
Hmm to me it looked like something out of the 1990s, not like regular email at all…
Well you all use messages way more than me because I don’t even know what you mean half of the time… I never needed to “stay” in the inbox (I think you mean reading a message while another is open? I’d open the inbox in another window /tab but the solution from Kanerva looks clever…).
No, I meant that if I read a message and then I want to read another one, I have to do the process again: clicking on my icon, then clicking on the little envelop, then open another message. But actually, I just realized that I can click on the envelop at the top of the message to go back to the inbox. But nothing is intuitive, it all needs a lot of poking around.
And yes, the old forum looked ancient, but that’s why it was simple to me. No extras.
See, this is all new to me! I thought the notifications were the inbox! I hadn’t realized there was an actual inbox I could get to. No wonder I didn’t like it!
Just popping in to recommend that people check the forum user guide and do the @postbot interactive mini-tutorial (you’ll find it on your messages with the title “Greetings!”). It should help you get your bearings around the new forum and experiment with some of the new features.
Popularity-wise, the new forum is going really well though! We have a lot more people participating in it regularly than we did in the old one, and the number of posts here is really impressive. That said, not everyone in Postcrossing is a “forum person”, which is completely understandable! This is a space for a subset of postcrossers who want a bit more “mail action”, and also want to do things together as a community.
