[Mindi]

As many of you may know by now, we're getting ready to upgrade the site and forum software. In our testing of the import process to the new software we discovered that the PM database is completely out of control. We have never put official limits around PM boxes, but it seems some people are abusing this feature and never deleting anything. This slows down the import process significantly and takes up a lot of room on the server.

Therefore, the new forums will have PM limits installed that will not allow you to have more than 100 total PMs (in and out box combined) at one time or you won't be able to receive additional PMs. Before everyone starts yelling, also you should know that in the new software there are simple buttons where you can download your PMs to a CSV, XML or Text file. So in the future, staying under the limit should not be a problem for anyone. Moderators and Administrators are getting slightly larger boxes based on the fact they have to do corrective communication with users and if you fit into one of those categories, please see the moderator forum for more information.

However, the problem we now have is that we need to get everyone in compliance with this new limit before we do the site and software change. So starting now, everyone needs to work on their PM box and get the total messages under 100 PMs and as quickly as possible so this issue does not keep interfering with our testing process for the site conversion. If your PMs are not cleaned up before the site conversion, we will delete everything but your latest 100 PMs to make sure everyone is in compliance.

For most people, these limits won't even affect them. Less than 2% of our registered members have over 100 PMs, but those 2% make up over 2/3rds of our PM database, making their total number of PMs to be about 69,000 PMs! The highest person has over 3,000 PMs which is just freakin ridicuous. So it's time to clean it up folks, or we'll be cleaning it up for you.

Please contact me if you have any questions.