Would it be possible for sent/unread PM's to have the closed envelope symbol? and have underneath saying either it's read or unread. Because it's confusing the way it is. Not sure if the other person has read the PM or not.

The problems with anything along those lines are:
1. How should it handle a conversation with multiple participants? Should it only be marked as "read" once all participants have read it?
2. How should the forum display which messages you have/haven't read? Bearing in mind that with private conversations you may not have started the conversation but may have been the last person to reply.

I can see the benefits of such a feature but paid it a fair amount of consideration while writing the PM system and couldn't think of a good way of doing it while addressing those issues. There could also be potential issues of privacy, users not wanting the sender of the message to know that they've read it

I think knowing that it's been read should be included, perhaps in the outbox, next to the 'participants' name you could put some small symbol/icon?

^ What he said.

They could always opt out on such, if possible to do.

1. Possibly have it like this if multiple participants.

Subject	Participants
message 1	Darkmage 1-Unread Darkmage 2-Read Darkmage 3-Unread

But it's Private Messages, and not public to outside people, so how's it a privacy issue?

Its a privacy issue because you're invading on their activity. Say you were sitting there constantly refreshing waiting for me to read it, not only is that creepy but also loads the server remembering who read what. The idea Nick is to create the best service with little server impact. Quite frankly, I see absolutely no reason to have this added, since a person might reply once they've read the PM. Either way the PM system is perfect as is.

The server already logs whether they've read it or not. It's just a matter of displaying that information another time. Nothing more. Won't add any server load really.

Posted By Michael on 5th Jan 10 at 10:09pm

 

Its a privacy issue because you're invading on their activity. Say you were sitting there constantly refreshing waiting for me to read it, not only is that creepy but also loads the server remembering who read what. The idea Nick is to create the best service with little server impact. Quite frankly, I see absolutely no reason to have this added, since a person might reply once they've read the PM. Either way the PM system is perfect as is.

The server already logs whether they've read it or not. It's just a matter of displaying that information another time. Nothing more. Won't add any server load really.

Agreed.

I think it would be good to have some sort of notification system in place, but i'm not totally sure what method would be the most effective, considering it is a multi-user conversation in some occasions.