I am considering the removal of private messages within renshuu (except to/from users and myself).
At the moment, roughly 1% of active users use private/direct messages in renshuu (to users other than myself) on any given week. In other words, an extremely small number. We have a very active community (both here and in our discord), but 995 of this activity is done in public places (community area, forums, etc.).
Additionally, renshuu's users cover a huge age range. There have been no incidents (big or small) to speak of, but as a solo dev/maintainer of the entirety of renshuu, I feel a significant amount of concern that I cannot add the functionality to make sure that inappropriate messaging does not go on within the direct messages, and I don't want to be reactive and wait until something happens.
Because of this, I am considering removing the direct message button from all user profiles/etc., except for mine (as many users contact me with comments/questions about renshuu).
The choice is ultimately mine, but I would like to gather any input or feedback that you may have.
We still have our discord server, which allows and even encourages private messaging between people. The nice thing about discord is if something bad were to happen, we'd be able to take advantage of discord's support structure.
I occasionally use private messages to send or receive non-public feedback, because there’s no need to embarrass someone in public. I could certainly get along without it, but I probably would just opt for fewer interactions. I wonder if there aren’t less drastic measures that would address your concerns. What if every two-way conversation was an explicit three-way including you? You already have access to everything that happens on the platform, so this wouldn’t really change anything, but it might temper behavior.
You could add some basic word-based filters, so that you only see anything that is a match, rather than all items.
We could help make a list of sensitive words, and anytime those, a link, an email/phone number, or address occur in a message, you'd be able to review and possibly intervene. I'd guess this would trigger maybe a few times a week. You could maybe have a few trusted mods review individual message hits, and then only escalate to you to review the entire thread when needed.
You could also add a private age field to the user page / registration and disable messages to anyone 13 or 17 and under.
I'd love to see the site get more interactive, so removing this could be a step back.
Another option would be using a sentiment analysis library on the backend to pre-review. I'm sure there are some decent free ones out there that could catch bad messages.
Adding a report button to a thread (with confirmation modal) would be another obvious addition. This could shadow ban direct messages from that user to the receiver and trigger a review
All of these proposed changes, though, are significant amounts of work that I do not feel (so far, at least) that they are worth doing in order to maintain a feature used by ~1% of users. I, too, would like more interaction, but I think energy should be put into public features that nurture a stronger sense of community - I think those are going to get more bang for the buck (buck being my time and energy).
I occasionally use the friends-only private messages on here because I dislike social media apps. However, I wouldn't have any issues with losing the private messaging feature since we can use forums, which are arguably much easier to scan for unwanted behavior. I am concerned about the influx of new users causing issues over messages in the future, so I'd say removing the DM feature is a good idea.
All of these proposed changes, though, are significant amounts of work that I do not feel (so far, at least) that they are worth doing in order to maintain a feature used by ~1% of users. I, too, would like more interaction, but I think energy should be put into public features that nurture a stronger sense of community - I think those are going to get more bang for the buck (buck being my time and energy).
Occasional forum stability updates would be great. It sounds like the longer forums are experiencing formatting issues due to the massive number of comments in the reply threads. It's not a pressing issue by all means, but it may be worth addressing if users have to shift to talking in public forums.
I'd still like for some way to communicate with someone who randomly added you as a friend, be it to ask why (or to explain why if you randomly friended someone) or to discuss shared interests. Since in the vast majority of cases I feel that sort of thing can't really be done in forums, 'cause the odds of the reason being close enough to the pupose of whatever thread that lead to the interaction, are pretty low...
My only alternative idea would be a public comment box of some description on people's profiles, with one being able to decide if they'll only allow friends to comment, anyone, or no one, but regardless of that setting, anyone can view the comments.
My only alternative idea would be a public comment box of some description on people's profiles, with one being able to decide if they'll only allow friends to comment, anyone, or no one, but regardless of that setting, anyone can view the comments.
This is a great idea. We could also benefit from a forum section dedicated to lengthy conversations between users, as opposed to the brief question-answer exchanges that usually take place in Anything Goes. (Maybe it could be a new forum next to Anything Goes?)
