Private messaging is a dampener for group engagement
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We tried out one professional collectivex group and found that private messaging is dampening the group engagement objective.
Here is what I am suggesting - "It shall be great if private messaging is made optional (let managers decide)."
- If managers disallow private messaging, it encourages members to post on the forum increasing the interaction. Again, if Managers do wish to keep contact details visible, members can still do private messaging using a slightly inconvenient method of emailing separately. If the message is really "private" member can always choose emailing.
- For professional consulting groups, inability to disable private messages is a negative as the Manager feels left out and people develop relationships literally "using" the group.
- If we could have option of disabling or enabling private messaging, I think it would go big way in some groups meeting their objectives and Collectivex getting more popularity with people coming back frequently for social and professional interests.
- Most importantly, this feature may give managers their "due" as managers do a lot of networking and initial hard work to create the community.
I hope that adding the "disable private messaging" feature is feasible as it shall increase group engagement through the forum.
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Hi Khanna,
I feel the same way. I used the paid feature of $9 per month and disabled the visibility of contact details in my group benchmark.collectivex.com but discovered that members can send private messages thus getting contact details of each other.
Hope something can be done soon about it. Look forward to response from collectivex team. Thanks!
Vikram - Thanks for opening up this discussion. We've considered this and do plan to expand our Premium Permission Controls feature to allow managers to go a "second" step - not only making the contact details private, but to disable the "private messaging" feature, as well
We want to do this in way that meets the needs of the manager and group (encourages group engagement), but also leaves Groupsites effective for networking and collaboration (helps make things happen and for which Groupsites are intended). Therefore, we will allow the user to turn this feature back on at an individual level as a preference. We're not able to provide an estimated delivery date for this enhancement but the development request is being tracked internally on Ticket #1231.
I am in desperate need of this feature as well. Members have been abusing it by sending offensive and weird e-mails to other members, which has actually prevented new members from attending our "offline" events as they fear whom will be in attendance. I definately think that CollectiveX needs to place this as a higher priority. I know my team is looking into building our own site due to this main reason.
Matthew,
We certainly understand why you think you need this feature, and in very large groups it may have particular application. That said, we might also suggest (even when you have this capability) that you consider a strategy of "quality" over "quantity."
We have found many groups do well by providing guidelines and allowing the community to police itself. Then, as a Groupsite manager, if you find that a member abuses private messaging, send that member a warning and/or instantly remove him or her from the group.
In fact, we see this strategy may even improve the quality of attendees at your live events.
Prohibiting a would-be email abuser from sending a Private Message in your Groupsite will not prevent this person from showing up to a live event. However, if you leave the Private Messaging feature intact, you can "call out" bad behavior (thereby setting the bar for more productive interaction when these members are face-to-face with others), or remove the offender from the group all together. (A spammer is clearly more interested in personal gain than mutually beneficial relationships or your group's goals).
Other members will quickly report spam and email abusers, especially if your guidelines encourage members to do so.
Once members trust that your group has a good quality constituency (enforced by the fact that you remove email offenders/abusers), your Groupsite as well as your live events can continue a great reputation for high quality membership.
Again, we do see application for what you're asking for and we will offer increased permission controls related to Private Messaging in the future. However, the above strategy may be an effective and less expensive alternative to building your own site, or even using controls we may provide. You may want to consider or even embrace it, regardless of the platform you use.
Hi Diana,
I appreciate your ideas and thank you for explaining this. However, we do have frustrating experiences as our groups grow bigger. Something that we passionately create and nurture should not be mismanaged by some.
We expect members to be civilized and respect others. We also expect people not to offend others or send inappropriate messages. We hope and pray that our competitors will not keep jumping back to our communities with newly created email ids (every other day) and send damaging private messages. We also hope that our groups shall continue to thrive even after people got in touch with each other and start discussing issues privately.
Disabling personal messaging shall definitely act as "mistake proofing" instead of "corrective action" every time. We tell people this in our Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma programs all the time. By the way I am a Six Sigma trainer and I need to be careful that I do not start preaching here.
So Diana, my request is please see if this new feature can be expedited.
I must mention here that Collectivex is a wonderful platform and some of the great features here were never visualised by us when we were planning our own website (before discovering collectivex). So unlike Matthew, we plan to invest more on Collectivex even if this feature does not come up soon. But it will be lot lot better if it does.
Regards,
VK
Any update to this? We are now over 1400+ members and will be unfortunately leaving the platform if this isn't soon resolved. I am not sensing this as a high priority for Groupsites?
Hello Diana,
I am eagerly awaiting updates on this. We now have 5500 + members (second fastest growing groupsite) and finding it difficult to manage with too many (inappropriate) private messages doing rounds. We have also had spammers joining the network with a female name and sending obtrusive messages resulting in our forum image getting maligned.