Published on 12, July, 2020
Because of a few things that have happened recently, I thought these points might be useful to some:
1. If you want to be friends with someone and send and receive PMs, other than the friendship request you need to have your settings on accepting PMs from 'friends only' or 'everyone'.
There is someone on my friends list who I recently accepted, who either doesn't have their settings correct, or doesn't want messages, or there is a technical problem, as I can't message them back.
2. When you 1st send the request and it includes a message you have written, the only way for the recipient to see that full message is if you have notifications, and then you may/should be able to read it there.
In my case unfortunately, it's in another email address which I set up when my own one became inaccessible due to a NAS technical problem.
3. If you find that you don't want PMs from someone you are receiving them from, as I understand it, you can either change your settings to 'no one' or have 'friends only' set but then remove them as a friend.
I am assuming this works but haven't had cause to do so.
Addendum: it doesn't work unfortunately
See Former Members post.
Screenshot of the settings below:
So, I found out earlier today that unfriending a person doesn't remove their ability to continue to message you. I have spent a number of hours scouring the website and there doesn't appear to be a clear means of stopping someone from messaging you after you have accepted their friend request and started up a conversation.
As a female on this platform I find this somewhat alarming as it leaves us vulnerable adults open to all sorts with no real way of looking after ourselves without deleting our accounts.
I have reached out to the community manager and I'm hoping they will be able to assist me. I leave this comment here merely to let others know and to urge you all to seriously think about who you are accepting as a friend on here.
There was a former member I had been friends with on here, who later unfriended me. Because we had exchanged messages when we were 'friends', we found that we were still able to exchange private messages with each other. I'm not sure what their message settings had been after they had unfriended me, but mine had been set to 'Friends Only'.
I should add that after this former member had changed their username several times. Something that may be worth remembering is that every member has a unique member ID (the NAS number assigned when an account is created). Therefore, if a member changes their username, their unique member ID (the NAS number) remains the same. I'm no I.T. expert, but I suspect this may well go some way to explaining why the former member was still able to message me despite neither of us being 'friends' and them changing their username.
As a result of that unique member ID, this probably also explains why it is possible for two or more members to have exactly the same username.
Having said all this, I find it interesting to read about Bees' experience.
Yh like I said it seemed to be a bug, but if it is a site wide bug then as the gamers say we might be able to "exploit" it for a good purpose.Although saying that they recently did work on the servers so hopefully if that was something we could use they didn't fix it. I think it's worth petitioning the NAS through their main site to get the IT folk to fix this server with some much needed features in general though. I was surprised this place doesn't have a block or and temporary mute user function though I haven't had cause to need one myself except for days I'd like less notifications in general without having to completely unsub from a thread.
This also surprised me too! I'm expecially surprised that you can't prevent somebody from messaging you after they have started. If there is a way to petition for change to protect female presenting people on here then I think it could be worth it otherwise I can see a lot of females leaving as we are being left wide open to harassment.