was it not enough? Is there something we can do? Deleting PMs that have more than 50 posts, for example?

A lot of you have done a very good job of deleting PMs, and for that we are grateful. There is an underlying problem, however, that keeps the number of PMs on our server very large, and that is that a Private Message is not deleted from our server until ALL participants have deleted it from their PM box.

I learned that there was one PM (a 'party' PM) that had been going for almost 4 months and had over 10,000 replies in it. There were dozens of participants, and several of them refused to delete it. Others had not logged in for many, many months and had never even read it, much less deleted it. It is gone now, but only because I worked over the weekend to remove it from the PM boxes of the remaining participants. While I was working on that, I noticed that many members still have many pages of PMs, some of them quite large.

Those kinds of things are already preventing us from backing up the forums, and they have the potential to take down the forums altogether. If that happens, we could lose everything here and have to start all over. Arthur is very unhappy with this situation. We simply cannot continue to allow people to store that many PMs. You will be seeing a lot of changes within the next week, and I will be announcing those changes soon.

Oh! I understand now! That's really a problem!

I think that peoples have to be more responsible and must know that they can save a thread on their computer. The only difficult is that they have to save each page of the same topic, one by one. It's tiresome but feasible!
And so they may keep the PMs they love!

We must consider now that PMs are only for quick help (for example when have to give a spoiler) and can be deleted very soon!

If we want to get a "Private Conversation", that's not the same thing and it's better to do it on other "Private Forums"!!

For games and fictions, there is the Kittenangel2001's forum: LDW Games Stories for example.

I don't know what to say more for now but I'm sure we may help you, Barbara and dear administrators . I hope!

Well, I go back to my PMs to save the more I can and delete them!

I feel responsible for keeping certain PM's, and I hope to get rid of all PM's that seem to have taken a backseat to me now. I just went over my PM's and stumbled across one that I think is fairly important, though. So I'm kinda glad that this came up.

I got rid of all the pms and maybe some are not getting the massage and don't log in and maybe send them email or something. Just an idea to get the massage across

Barbara, if they don't get deleted, please let me do it for you!!

Just joking, yall. But if it were up to me; I'd give a deadline and then do it for you. Kaboom, all gone!

It may come to that.

Yikes.

For me or you? Who is going to have fun? I left four on mine, all of which are very small; but if I must, I will delete after printing.

I copied all of my important PMs to text files and deleted them from my PM box. And, of course, I have backups of my computer, too, just in case.

if you want, i'm happy to let my forums be a "gateway" to pm's. we only have 1 member, me, so, if you want to move pm's to my forum, i'll post the link.

http://lokisforum.boardzero.com/forum.html

That's a very nice offer, but it's not possible to move existing PMs to your forums. The number of PMs we have here would probably exceed your allotted forum space, too.

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lol QuickStorm

Please share how you copied your PMs to a text file. I've been just copying and pasting one PM post at a time and it is a bit tedious to say the least. Any easier way would be much appreciated. Thank you!

It's fairly straightforward, although slow and tedious if you have to do a lot of them at once, because each page of the PM thread must be copied and pasted before moving on to the next page.

If all you want to do is preserve the text, simply use the cursor to highlight from the PM subject line (just under the Participants tab) to the bottom of the last reply on that page of the PM and copy it (Ctrl-C on Windows and Command-C on Mac), then paste it into a text program, such as Notepad, WordPad, TextEdit, etc. and save it. That is how I preserved my PMs, since it requires the least space on my hard drive.

If you want to preserve the look and formatting of the page, with all the colors and images, just highlight the portion of the PM you want to save and copy it into something like Microsoft Word. It will look just like the PM, but the files will be considerably larger (20 times the size of a simple text file is typical, but it depends upon how many images are in the PM).

There are also ways to save the HTML or the Web page through the browser, but those methods copy more than just the PM thread.

If you want to be really organized, you can make a folder called something like Saved PMs and make a subfolder in that folder for each person or type of PM.

I'm admin of a forum that uses a variant of UBBThreads (Groupee). In there, a PM is only properly deleted if the originator of the PM deletes it.

I've done some testing here, and I've seen that a PM thread is deleted only when all participants delete it, regardless of who is the last one to delete it.

what i meant to say was:



i'll start a topic for private conversations (pc's), where you can start pc's which will be automatically pruned if not replied to in x no. of days. in addition, you can create pm's witch will not be pruned, but at an upper limit of 5 per person at any one time.

Just a tip for people using Safari - a really good way (like Lady mentioned) is to save the pm directly from the browser. Just make sure you save it is a pdf NOT a web archive as your computer will not be able to track the site if you delete the pm. To save as a web archive you click File and the Save As, but to save it as a pdf go File and then Print, and choose save as pdf from the bottom right hand button.