Stop merging PMs?

[duidamasterXD 9,627]

Since the forum update, consecutive PMs made within a short period of time have been merged together instead of appearing as distinct messages. This is irritating because it's now more difficult to resume a conversation if there's a short break in the middle. If I finish some work and want to let a friend know I'm available to talk again, my messages are simply merged together and no notification is sent to the person I'm trying to talk to.  Which means I have to either wait several minutes to get their attention, or contact them in some other way.

It's also much easier to miss messages in general if conversations are moving at a moderate pace. If one person wants to add a detail or share something they forgot to mention, that addendum is now merged onto the end of a message that the other person can think they've already read.

I know that tech people have a million other things to do, but if it's feasible to turn off message merging in the PM system, I think it'd make it a much more effective way to talk to people.

[Fhaolan 4,484]

I agree with this, but I can't find a way to pull it off with the configuration tools as it stands. In the old forum software PMs were distinct from Posts, and the configuration of them were independent of each other. In this version it seems they're using the same engine, so when we turn on post merging there's no way to tell it 'Just Posts, don't merge PMs'.

So this will have to go onto the list of things for the dev team to deal with.  I wish I could fix it myself, as I find it irritating as well.

[Jeric 46,854]

When the update hit, individual posts made back to back didn't merge. They were separate posts. That led to complaints. Fhao turned on the merge to address the complaints, and then that led to the knowledge that IPS decided PM's and posts = same. 

...

Fhao tried to lower the threshold to make it less of an annoyance, but it's a pick your poison situation.  Or ... 

That was what Fhaolan must have felt like that day. 

 

....

 

So yeah. The PM issue actually came up recently for me. I actually had to send a second PM instructing the person to reread my original reply. He had made another reply seconds after I hit reply. Mine merged with my initial reply and his went after ... so a huge chunk of information would have been missed. 

I can see how this would be a blasted nightmare for the Mods and Admins now that I think about it .... @_@