Suggestion: Direct Messaging Feature
I've noticed that there's no option to directly message members of this community or to create group chats on here(at least to my current understanding). To my current knowledge, the only way to communicate with someone on this forum is to make or reply to a entry post which warrants a certain formality and can be a bit inconvenient. Perhaps if a direct messaging feature was installed or a Discord/Slack/etc for this community was created it'd allow for a lot more easier interactions and foster a stronger sense of community.
To add to the discussion, I personally like the fact that everything here has to be "publicly shared", and have always found it a "plus feature" that TPM's forum does not allow for direct messaging.
I can understand that, but I think some people would want access to more private forms of communication if they wanted to do things like exchange contact info so there could be calls and such.
Yeah, I also think it's pros and cons.
PMs
I think it's an important and easy-to-forget advantage that everything must stay public.
See some reasons I shared here on why I'm not fond of receiving personal messages regarding the forum.
Somewhat similarly, PMs may encourage some type of "less than straight" behavior that we want to help people to root out here -for example, one may follow up "not-so-cool" public behavior with a private apology only, a form of power scalping. Or one may elicit private support to form a faction rather than, say, earn that support with straight behavior and value-giving-.
There is a time and place for everything so, in real life, you may want to use those techniques sometimes.
But it's always best to first learn the "proper" stragith and eagle way, and then carve exceptions out of that, rather than learn to make the exceptions the rule.
Discord, Telegram... Opinions?
That being said, it's not like I'm against PMs.
It's just that it would add quite some software overhead, and that's what I'm not fond of because I like the website to run "lean and mean".
Fewer things that can break, fewer interruptions, higher uptime, higher reliability, faster load times, etc. etc.
BUT...
Somebody had already mentioned before a Discord or Telegram group.
And I'm definitely mulling it over.
I've got some pros & cons opinions on it but they're based on zero experience with Discords and Telegram chats.
So if anyone has any opinion or idea on it, happy to read.