For the Private Message Board - How about a change?

Dear Madhava,

I was noticing Istagosthi bulletin board's system for private messages. Rather than coming in haphazardly into an inbox, each letter starts a thread similar to those on the main forums. That way one has in effect all the letters in a correspondence automatically collated together. It is also much easier to search through a particular set of correspondence than the current system we are using here.

What do you think? My mailbox is getting full quickly and if I want to know when did I write that brilliant comment to XYZ, I have to go in and out of all the messages to that person.

Anyone else have an opinion?

Jagat

...if my two cents are worth a hill of beans, then I say "I agree" and "It would make sense"

Here's another two cents: Sounds like a good idea.

On Istagosthi you have a choice whether to simply reply or to start a new chain of letters and responses. I find the inbox I have here is more sophisticated in a lot of ways but that is one in which it could be improved. It also would make responding to a longer note easier, I should think. But maybe it's an option for only that version of the BBS software. I have had to search recently through a bunch of messages for some info I needed and it wasn't easy.

I'll look into this. The easiest way around would probably be to craft together a small PM search engine that will grab all messages with a similar subject line to the one at hand and sort them alphabetically.

By the way, is there some kind of backup process that runs at about 1:30 am pacific time every morning? Everything seems to slow down consistently around that time. Pages won't load, things don't appear to post, it all comes down to a crawl. As I look at the time it always seems to be between 1:30 and 2.

I also experienced a strong slowdown in the well-defined time of cca. 10.00 CET.

@Jagat:

I also found that message-board-like solution useful.

Tapati, there shouldn't be any major processes running at that time. I'll have to look this up. Do others notice this, too? I have a hard time saying how fast or slow things are here, as my own connection is the main bottleneck here.

I will start noting the exact times I experience this so maybe we can pin it down. I usually have to just give up at that point as it seems impossible to load the next page. Other sites and forums work just fine so I know it's not on my end. Then I go back after awhile and it's just fine. So I always figured given the time of day that it was regular back ups or maintenance of some kind.