Received a suspicious, inappropriate or abusive PM?

there's no such thing as a free lunch.

I have 2 purple moosage emails but nothing in my in box. It seemed suspicious anyway, but... ?

probably part of today's de-spamming event.

unless you are actually a long lost relative of a a famous millionaire and inherited his fortune.  just pay 5000 'dottards' to collect your 'inhairyance'.

in which case, I'm sorry it was mistaken as spam.

Gotcha. No worries. All theposts I saw about this said repeatedly to let folks know,

"
We don't have 'private' messages. The closest we have is 'purple mooseages'. This is where you send a message to one other individual, and it is made available for all of the staff to see too, so they can forward it to their co-workers for a good laugh. ..."

This is presented in a humerous framework almost as though it is a joke and not true.

And so I don't think many people understand this;
Is this actually true or a joke that once a PM is sent it is not privately sent to the recipient only, but that the 'staff' here can actually read them too should they decide too?

Please don't wrap the answer to this up in a confusing humorous framework.

People should know absolutely if mods have access to PMs. I thought that was just some not so good attempt at trying to be funny.

If mods really do, and this is not funny then it is so misleading as to almost be criminal and it should be changed and made clear that the PMs are absolutely NOT private and mods can read them.

That is so odd and unbelievable that it should not have been the intertwined with am attempt at humor.

I have thought it was just a joke the whole time I've been a member until recently

Not very cool imo. And I think most other members here would agree to that.

permies.com/forums is a forum, not a private messaging service.  

Respectfully, as I see it, the admins/mods on this forum have made it perfectly clear that there are NO completely private communications on this site. They have couched it in playful terms to "be nice" and maintain the tone of the site, but there is no lack of clarity.

If you want full privacy, there are many other options you can pursue. Ain't freedom grand?

You have to realize that there are trolls and scoundrels probing a site like this at all times. The admins have a responsibility to protect the integrity of the site, its members, its reputation and mission, and potentially to protect against liability.

Think of it this way: we're all having a grand party on Mr. Wheaton's back porch. But if push comes to shove, and things turn nasty, it's still private property. We can, and should, be kicked to the curb if we can't behave like civilized human beings.

My 2 cents'.

The purple moosage poetry is my poetry.  

If there is anybody that read that bit of poetry and found it clear that PMs on this site are not private, then please put a thumbs up on this post.  

I think the purple moosage message is clear.  Very clear.  I am baffled there you find even a pinch of it unclear.  

Purple Moosages are not private.  The staff can look at them whenever they like.  

We used to have problems with awful stuff being sent in PMs - so many, many different flavors of awful.  And nobody wanted to go look because they used to be called "private messages".   So the awful grew exponentially.   So we changed everything over to "purple mooseages" and cleaned it all up.  

If you want a private conversation - go to email.   I no longer want to facilitate private messages.  

Pardon me,

Purple moosage, not "message".



Levity.  It's essential in any argument.  

I'm not sure how there can be any confusion, with the big fucking colored banner saying that messages are not private. Not to mention the fact that nothing on the internet is really private...

Just a reminder that permies is not a private messaging service.

We host forums that allow some semi-private person to person messaging.  or Moosaging as it says in the PM screen.

I also want to mention that the "Be Nice" requirements also apply to the PM system.  

Why?  Because people behaved so poorly that we had to do something about it.  

Bumping this up as I've just had to remove a load of spam PMs.

If you've recently had an email telling you that you have a PM but it's mysteriously disappeared, don't worry, you didn't miss anything.  

And if you have received anything inappropriate, please report it to us so we can clean things up for you and anyone else who's been sent anything similar.

Generally, we treat unsolicited PM survey requests as spam.

Please feel free to report them.  

Hey, reported an odd PM that tried to lure me into chatting on different platforms. New signup, zero posts. Nope.

Bump!

A friendly reminder to please use the report button on suspicious and peculiar purple mooseages. And also a big thank you to those who do report them!!!  :D

If you get a post that says 'hello' from someone you don't know, who hasn't posted yet, it's fine to hit the 'report' button and we can check them out a bit.

A reminder that people on the internet are not always what they seem.
We assume everyone here are adults and understand that the world can be a dangerous place, but do feel free to report a pm that makes you uncomfortable.

Doing our best to keep the site safe - this is a reminder that you can hit the report button if you recieve a dubious looking message.

It's spam season again.

Do not feed the spammers.  They bite.  

Use the report button instead.  We'll feed them to our resident bot who excels in spam squashing.

Removed some spam today.  Thanks for those using the report button when you get spammy stuff in your PM box.