Most forums nowadays put a limit on how many messages someone can have in their inbox, however I have found that some members leave certain forums because of the limit put on, and some actually like having a limit. What is your forums inbox limit, and why are they so important in today's forums?
Honestly, I figured putting a 5k limit on everyone would be the ideal solution, 5k messages seems like a bit much so I honestly feel most people won't get close to that. However this is another thing that most forums offer as a premium feature that I just give to my members. 😛
What is the big deal about inbox limits? What is your forums limit, and do you offer a premium upgrade?
I honestly feel that limits on private messaging shouldn't exist, web hosting is cheaper than it has ever been so there is really no excuse.
A better approach IMHO would be to impose no limit on the amount of messages and instead purge messages older than X amount of time, run a daily cron job to find and delete messages older than X.
This is more of a forum software issue though, an old dated feature that is no longer useful.
I absolutely despise inbox limits. I constantly lose important things by having to clear it out every so often. It irks me, haha. I would never want to put my members through the pain.
Honestly, if I were an admin of a forum software, that limited the number of PMs per folder used, I would either use the forum's unlimited option, or set the PM count so high, that no one would be able to reach that amount, unless they do a high volume amount of PMs, over the course of 5 years.
I don't mind having members store members, but it would be a problem if every single member started stockpiling hundreds of messages. It would eat up some disk space - Not much, but it could be an issue years down the road if you have thousands of members.
I don't see a huge problem though with members having more than 50 saved messages and I don't think limiting them is really beneficial.
I was actually genuinely wondering this earlier today. I noticed that I had 16+ pages of PMs in my inbox. I don't plan on ever going back and reading most of them again...but at the same time I was wondering if it's even worth the effort to decide which to keep and which to toss. Do PMs really use up a lot of space?
