[Aardwolf]

In an email program (well, in Gmail at least), if you hit "reply" on a message you sent, the new message gets sent to the same person the original was addressed to.

PMs, I just discovered, don't work that way. I just sent a follow-up PM to myself instead of to the intended recipient, and didn't catch the mistake until a good 0h30 later. If it had been something important (e.g. if I had just said something to a moderator, realized it could be misinterpreted as saying something ban-worthy, and needed to clarify myself ASAP), it could have been disastrous.



I don't use PMs much here, so it probably won't be myself who gets saved by changing this, but...



Aside: general gripe: it's really hard to follow a back-and-forth PM discussion. How impossibly difficult would it be to do something about that?

[Scotty]

Note: The odds of getting banned for something said in PMs that is merely able to be misinterpreted and not actively hostile or egregiously ban-worthy are very low.

Especially since mods can't ban people.  That's admins.

[zookeeper]

Well, arguably most messaging systems should probably verify whether you really want to send a message to yourself.

[Aardwolf]

Note: The odds of getting banned for something said in PMs that is merely able to be misinterpreted and not actively hostile or egregiously ban-worthy are very low.

Especially since mods can't ban people.  That's admins.

Yeah yeah. Combination of me being scared "that could've been bad", and then trying to see if my concerns could possibly be shared by (or relevant to) the rest of the forum users.

[Aardwolf]

So yeah... uh...

I take it "make back-and-forth PM discussions easier to follow" would be a huge undertaking, that it would probably be a huge overhaul of some core SMF functionality, right?

What about changing what it does when you 'reply' to an outgoing message? Or just having a warning when the only recipient is yourself?

[Goober5000]

Any modification of SMF functionality would require installing a mod.  Just pay attention to what is listed in the recipient box.

Have you looked at the PM Setttings page at all?  It looks like displaying PMs in Conversation mode would do what you want:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?action=pm;sa=settings

[Aardwolf]

Yeah I just discovered the "Conversation" setting a minute ago

Although, now that I've enabled it, I see the conversation I was talking about where I accidentally hit 'reply' to myself is broken, though. It treats the part before and after the accidental message as separate conversations.  But then again, I did delete the accidental message-to-self, so maybe that's why?



If I were designing it I would just make it include all messages sent between the two people, with per-message subject lines.

"If I were designing it".