Allow adding (or replying) initial/default recipient when replying to a PM

[pauamma]

Title:
Allow adding (or replying) initial/default recipient when replying to a PM

Area:
inbox, private messages

Summary:
When replying to a Dreamwidth PM sent to you, allow adding recipients to the initial recipient (sender of the message you're replying to), or even replacing that recipient with an arbitrary list, for a quick and dirty forward,

Description:
This wouldn't breach privacy that I can see (who the original message went to), because the only initial recipient of the reply would be the sender, as it already is, and no other recipient of the original message would be offered as a suggestion or listed. (Indeed, that would be impossible, as the list of original recipients isn't kept anywhere. One message sent to several users looks the same as several identical messages sent very close.)

Poll #5205 Allow adding (or replying) initial/default recipient when replying to a PM

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 49

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
13 (26.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
15 (30.6%)

(I have no opinion)
19 (38.8%)

(Other: please comment)
2 (4.1%)

Comments

[marahmarie]

I'll change my vote to a "yes" if you can give me the Cliff notes version of this and from there, I decide that I can respect that this does not violate privacy - I'm just not getting it, the way it's written. In other words, say my friend Sophie PMs me. I reply, and when I do, for some reason I can send my reply to 20 other people? And the reply includes her original message? How does this not violate Sophie's privacy? I'm trying hard to get this, but so far, I don't.

[pauamma]

The scenario you described is already possible now, if you're worried about deliberate breaches of privacy. If your concern is about accidental breaches of privacy, there are ways to make that harder, eg by having a checkbox that enables the extra recipients.

The breach of privacy I was thinking of was more along the lines of you learning (and maybe passing on to others) that in addition to you, Sophie sent her message to Alice and Carol. That information isn't available to you now, and the change wouldn't make it possible.

[marahmarie]

Oh, great. So, right now it's possible to send my reply to Sophie to 20 other people, with her original message included? I had no idea. This will swear me off PMs forever, though, if it's true.

And I'm still awaiting the Cliff notes - so far all you've done is confirm my worst fears, but you have not explained your suggestion in a way I can begin to understand (no matter how many times I re-read your OP - four times since last night, to be precise - still, I am not getting it).

And considering you're up to 10 votes for "do not implement" as of this moment, I may be onto something in mentioning that.

[matgb]

I just tested, and it is currently possible to send a PM to multiple people using commas, but not possible to add extra people into a reply.

I, personally, never use PMs to send, and rarely even reply to people on there, I'll go find an email address out of preference.

Ergo, I voted 'no opinion' as it's not something I even think adds to site functionality. Then, I've always had a publicly listed googleable email address and I know I'm unusual that way.

But I'm fairly sure that the discussion seems to be split between people that view PMs as a sort of on site email system, and people that view them as something copmpletely diffrent from email that should be different.

I'm not sure that those two desires are going to be easy to reconcile.

So, help me out, why and how do you think PMs are, and should be, different to email?

[marahmarie]

I'll tell you what a private message should not be, just to shorten this: it is not (or should not be) forwardable. It is not (or should not be) disseminated through blind copies. It does not (or should not) involve more than two people - the original sender and the original recipient.

If you, Matt, send the same PM to five people, then it is not a private message. It is just a message. There's nothing private about it at all.

Likewise...

If I receive a message from Sophie and copy my answer, along with her original message, to her and five others, then it is not a private reply. It's just a reply. And her private message is no longer private, either.

If what I've described above is not how private messaging works - nor how it should work, in most people's opinions- then I want the name of it changed to "on-board email", "the mailing lists", "on-site email" or whatever phrase best connotes no expectation of privacy at all.

I absolutely hate misnomers, especially ones that are as misleading as "private message" is turning out to be - at least judging by this thread.

[sophie]

I'll tell you what a private message should not be, just to shorten this: it is not (or should not be) forwardable.

For the record, the scenario that the parent commenters are describing (which is already possible) is to copy the message into the clipboard, paste it into a new message, and use the 'multiple recipients' feature of specifying multiple names separated with comments to send that message to others. Since the message system doesn't distinguish between 'replies' and 'new messages', it's basically the same thing. From a purely technical standpoint, adding this feature wouldn't make any difference.

In other words, for a message to 'not be forwardable', the Dreamwidth code would need to check the contents of the message to make sure that the message you're sending doesn't contain content from any message you've received previously. Obviously, that's not going to happen, because it would be an artificially silly restriction.

Now, from a social standpoint (disregarding the fact that anybody who really wants to can just send a new message anyway), I can see where you're coming from about not having a forward option. Not having that option would mean that the other person would have needed to specifically use a new message, which will at least mean that they would have had to think more about whether that's a good action.

In the end, I'm against this suggestion, but not for that reason; I'm against it because I think that PMing isn't really supposed to be a replacement for email. There are better tools available for the job.

[matgb]

OK, that makes sense and I sort of agree with you. If they're called private, then many people will assume a degree of privacy from them, which would I suspect include not sending blind copies to others and similar.

But I've never thought of them as private messages, merely on site messages. So I'll talk it through with Denise when I get a chance, and consider rewording the relevent FAQs to remove the term private.

The feature itself doesn't use the term private messages anywhere I can see, it's just documentation that does. I've found two, How do I send people messages on Dreamwidth? and How do I protect my privacy on Dreamwidth? (Part 2), that's from a cursory search, I'll do a more thorough scan when I've time, if you see any more let me know.

Not perhhaps a long term fixx, but there's going to need to be a discussion about what people want the site to offer in terms of features like messages, so we either call them PMs and keep them private, or we call them something else and don't give people false expectations, and move them towards a different functionality.

Definitely can't call them email though, they're not email, they don't follow email protocols.