New Comments: Messages

Profile comments are updated to the new Messages system on LibraryThing.



Where to access Messages (https://www.librarything.com/messages):

• From any other member's profile page, using the "Send Private Message" button at the top-right or the "See Conversation in Messages" link at the bottom-left of the profile page


• From your notifications box at the top-right of LibraryThing, when logged in, to the right of your member name


• From the "Messages" page in your sub-navigation menu from Home:

Main takeaways:

• All profile comments are now sent as private messages


• The comment wall has been removed from member's profile pages (but you can jump into Messages from a member's profile page)


• You can now star/favorite conversations* to "pin" them at the top of your Conversations list in Messages, both from recent Conversations (in the left sidebar) or from the "See all..." Conversations pages


• Messages is LT2-ified

Check them out and let us know what you think! Thanks to @conceptDawg and @knerd.knitter for their work on the feature.

*Edited for clarity: conversations are entire threads with other members, not individual messages. We can look at starring/pinning individual messages in the future, though.

I like this. My profile page is a lot less cluttery now (because, of course, I'm very lazy about deleting/archiving messages).

I also like the "pinning" because sometimes someone sends me useful info, and now I can actually find it again.

To add: If they aren't pinned, the conversations are sorted by most recent messages.

And we've added "Yourself" at the top because we know there are some people that message themselves as a way to keep notes on LT.

I miss the yellow highlighted “You’ve got a new message.” That little box at the top right is too indistinct by itself.

>5 2wonderY: We'll get better support for that soon. This isn't the last you'll see of updates for Messages, but I have to wait until a couple of other things are in place first.

Also note that if you have unread messages they will be noted with a badge on the Messages tab (if you are one of your Home, Profile, Reviews, etc. pages that has that subnav)

I'm not sure about this all private message thing but I have one serious difficulty. I don't message much and I have rarely deleted messages (apart from all the "A.N.Other thinks you have an interesting library.... " kind). I thought that I could continue to see my half of conversations but they all seem to have gone. I suppose the recipients have deleted my replies but I would like to be reminded of what I had written. Weren't both sides of a conversation retained before the recent changes?

>8 abbottthomas:

Click on "See Conversation" to see both sides.

>1 kristilabrie:

You can now star/favorite conversations to "pin" them

I'm not seeing how to do this. It looks like I can star a person, but I don't see a way to pin a specific message.

>9 lilithcat: Sometimes that works, but not always. I think maybe that my guess that the recipients have deleted my posts is right, so, presumably lost forever.

>10 lilithcat: Correct, you can star/pin entire conversations with another member, but not specific messages.

>12 kristilabrie:

But what if I have had multiple conversations with someone, and only wish to pin one particular conversation?

What about making the string "LibraryThing has moved to an all-private message system and removed the public wall on profile pages. All posts can be accessed in Messages." translatable?

>13 lilithcat: You cannot pin individual messages, only star a person so that their conversations are easily accessible.

>14 anglemark:. Done.

Will that ugly gray bar at the bottom of the profile page go away? The one with the new text about private messaging.

>16 2wonderY: I don't see that at all on my profile

>15 conceptDawg: Thanks!

>15 conceptDawg:

That's unfortunate. The way it was stated in >1 kristilabrie:, it appeared that this would be a useful way to find a specific message (as I noted in >2 lilithcat:) but that is clearly not the case. I think >1 kristilabrie: should be edited to clarify the situation.

>19 lilithcat: I don't think I mentioned that you could star individual messages? I only mentioned starring/pinning Conversations (in the way that LibraryThing is defining Conversations) with other members... forgive me if I'm being dense.

Is You can now star/favorite conversations to "pin" them... the part you'd like edited/clarified?

>20 kristilabrie:

I consider a "conversation" to be confined to one topic. I may have more than one conversation with the same person, and don't necessarily want to have all of them pinned. Your post didn't make it clear that you're really pinning the person, not the conversation.

Guess I won't be using the pinning options in messages then.

I can get to the whole list of messages from the person's profile. All the dozens of messages we have shared over many years. What would be helpful would be to mark specific messages.

>23 MarthaJeanne: Sorry, no plans to do that right now. It's something we can talk about but it wasn't part of this update.

>16 2wonderY: The grey box will soon go away. It's a temporary "Hey this feature has moved" box so that people don't freak out when they see their profile comments aren't there at the bottom of the page.

>21 lilithcat: Got it. I'll specify that! Sorry for the trouble.

I am not sure that this is the right thread to talk about this issue. Now when I edit my profile to add to my Favourite Books 2022- I can't change the spacing so that my list is single spaced - new books are now double spaced along with one or two at the top of my list.

>26 torontoc:

It's not. This thread is about the new Message system.

You should start a new thread in the Bug Collectors forum: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/897/Bug-Collectors

Missed this last week as I was on vacation.

Does the messaging system still have the behavior that if I send someone a message and they then delete it, I can no longer recover the content of the message? (so a "comment on someone's Facebook status" rather than an "email" approach)? That's made it pretty useless for me the past few years, but I was hoping it might have been rethought.

>28 lorax: I had raised this in 8> but had no response. I thought that I could see both sides of a conversation before these changes but from what you say that was only because my comments had not then been deleted by recipients.
I entirely agree with you that the loss greatly lessens the value of the system. Given that the messages are now all private it could hardly matter to anyone if both sides of conversations remained available if either party wanted to keep them.

Generally it seems impossible to delete anything completely in LT (I exaggerate, of course) so it is a pity this is an exception!

I didn't change any of the back-end data-handling of the system. This is something that we can certainly think about.

>30 conceptDawg: Thanks for that.

abbottthomas (#29):

Yeah, the "one person can unilaterally delete for the other participant" has, as far as I can tell, always been true, though until ~2014 (based on trawling through old threads) the UI didn't make it obvious or easy to delete a message you had sent someone else - and without clear visibility of other people's profiles, it also wasn't obvious that deleting one someone had sent you deleted it for them as well. I've complained about this a few times, but Tim seems pretty committed to this paradigm.

>31 abbottthomas: & >32 lorax:
We talked about this in our meeting yesterday and have decided to leave it the way it is. It's the way Facebook and a couple of other popular site do it so I think there is enough digital/cultural momentum that people will probably expect it to be that way.

>33 conceptDawg:

Facebook do that? I never honestly never noticed, and would have assumed the opposite.

(The reason that I've never noticed is presumably the fact that fb tends to be all about the latest - it's not a place where one commonly goes back and views old conversations. LT conversations, to my mind at least, have a bit more lasting relevance.)

Thanks for the feedback. I suppose that a workaround for anyone sufficiently concerned is to copy sent messages to oneself.

>34 AndreasJ: Facebook lets you choose.

>33 conceptDawg: Is there a large proportion of LT members who are active Facebook users? The cultures of the sites/companies seem extremely different to me.

I don't use Facebook, never have, and I would have expected that I'd be able to see both sides of the conversation even if the other person deleted it on her end.

>37 aspirit: I think there is a large portion of Facebook users as a cross section of, well...everywhere. I don't, personally, use it—in fact I've locked my account and would have to jump through some hoops to unlock it and use it. But the unfortunate fact remains that it is the juggernaut that people use and know.

For me it is exactly the same as for >38 lilithcat:.
And I wish the same behavior with LT.

I am not a gentleman and I have no "friends": |f|-avoidant since 2008.

My daughter and her peers think of it as an obsolete platform, although they do frequent the Instagram dimension of the Zuckerverse.

I understand that Facebook is popular (though in decline), but don't think it's the right paradigm to use for a private one-to-one messaging system. If you want to say "the recipient of your message has the right to delete it out from under you and you have no way to retrieve it", that's fine, but "But Facebook!" is not a good reason.

>42 lorax: "But Facebook!" is not a good reason.

Exactly. If this is how you want to do it, say so. Facebook and LibraryThing are very different media.

>38 lilithcat: et al
It's not just Facebook. It just happens to be the main one. Other social networks also deal with DMs the same way.

FWIW, this is not about Facebook. This is about the interplay between what you want, what we want to support, and the expectations of privacy created by other services and sites around the web. I don't, for example, use Instgram, but how Instagram handles privacy issues is part of how people today understand privacy and are trained to expect social media to work.

I'd be interested to hear about how other sites handle it.

I also feel that, since it was possible to delete messages completely before, it should continue to be so. Removing a privacy control is and ought to be avoided.

Tim, if I send you a message, whose privacy is affected by your ability to prevent me from having a record of that message?

Social media, in the sense of fb et al, isn’t really what informs my expectations of what LT’s messaging system should work like. I’d rather think of PM systems at online fora and the like.

(Yes, I’m enough of a dinosaur I still use fora. I suspect a disproportionate proportion of LT users are.)

I think writing on someone else's wall seems intuitively that you are ceding ownership of the thing, it's their wall so they have the right to clean it or keep it. But messages, inbox, sent, these things can give the feeling of it being email or text/SMS, and that maybe brings presumptions about certain defaults, eg. sent messages being saved regardless of what the recipient has done at their end.

Edits: added "or text/SMS" and other tinkering.

I've never really thought of profile messages as something I'd have control over once I hit send. I guess I've always thought of them like a letter: once it's out of my hands then it's someone else's.

>49 amanda4242: I think of them as Nevov does — emails that I send but retain a copy of in my Sent Mail folder. But even if we go with the actual letter analogy, the sender can still retain a copy before sending. There should be an option on LT for senders to choose to keep a copy of any message they send for their own records.

Could a privacy solution be to have a tick box "Save a copy for me" which informs the person at the other end "The sender has saved a copy of this message"?

Nevov (#51), I was having the same thought, though informing the recipient hadn't occurred to me. I suspect Tim will refuse both because he doesn't like options (they're fiddly) and because he seems to feel pretty strongly on this one. I suppose I can always just screenshot every message I send on here.

Is it time for a poll? :-)
I don't actually know how to do that.

>52 lorax: An non-options alternate could be a small bit of disclaimer text somewhere on the private message composing page, so folk are aware it operates on a recipient-owns basis and then anyone who is minded can always save their own copy at the time (as in the letter analogy >49 amanda4242:). For the cost of a bit of ugliness/clutter on that screen, if it saves potential disappointment and frustration further down the line that may be a price worth paying.

>46 lorax: My privacy. Haven't you ever had an ex ask for their letters back? :)

Even if we allowed preservation, I'm pretty sure we'd have to delete them if the account itself were deleted, at least for any user subject to the European GDPR rules.

Social media, in the sense of fb et al, isn’t really what informs my expectations of what LT’s messaging system should work like. I’d rather think of PM systems at online fora and the like.

Online fora are social media. So is LibraryThing. Any site that has users talking to each other in some way, not staring at a brochure, is social media :)

(Thank you, though for saying "fora." Don't get me started on forums and consortiums.)

>55 timspalding: Even if we allowed preservation, I'm pretty sure we'd have to delete them if the account itself were deleted, at least for any user subject to the European GDPR rules.

This seems like you're referring to the sender deleting their account, and subsequently their message sent to others would also be deleted. I can see a case that I may not have a right to "own" the messages other people send me.

But I was thinking of the opposite case — messages I send to others should not be deleted from my access simply because the other user deleted their account. I should be able to keep a copy no matter what they choose to do with the message on their profile.

I don't feel strongly about retaining the messages I sent, mainly because I don't use it often enough to care, but without knowing from this discussion how it works, I'd expect my messages to remain intact. And I do use FB. Never seen any of the messages I sent there disappear. Something I post on someone else's wall might, but not PMs.

What I consider more of a problem with this set up on LT is that community activities such as author spam have suffered yet another blow. It's already difficult to keep track who has been warned ever since all messages became private, without the possibility to make some public. The ability for the said author to delete the message and have no trace of it makes the entire system of warnings simply untenable. It is impossible to know who repeat offenders are. If you want us to continue doing this, we need to see whether the author has been warned already and s/he should not be able to delete that message.

timspalding (#55):

Haven't you ever had an ex ask for their letters back? :)

I'm a lesbian. We're notoriously on good terms with our exes.

Be that as it may, though, I've never had an ex demand I destroy all copies of everything I ever sent to them, and I doubt you have either. They may burn their copies or line the cat box with them, but they don't get my copies.

I'm pretty sure we'd have to delete them if the account itself were deleted, at least for any user subject to the European GDPR rules.

Admittedly it's been a few years since I took GDPR training, but I don't recall anything that said it gives Person B the power to remove Person A's access to a message sent by Person A to Person B.

What's expected elsewhere on the internet would matter less here if descriptions of LT features were clearer. Can we get hover (or slow press) text on the action link or something?

On what should happen on message deletion: I believe allowing each of us to delete our own posts, messages, etcetera is good for privacy. Allowing someone to delete a message on their own profile made sense, especially as it allowed the other member to clean up their own oftentimes public space. But now... the messaging system functions as private messaging. Typically, in my experience, a copy in private (or direct) message systems is saved in each conversation participant's account; deletion affects only the copy of the participant performing the act of deletion.

I would not expect clicking "Delete" on a private message to erase that message from the Inbox of the other member(s). At this moment, I'm unsure if that's what happens or not. Nothing around the messages says what the "Delete" link does.

>58 SandraArdnas: and >60 aspirit: These are both good points.

>58 SandraArdnas: What I consider more of a problem with this set up on LT is that community activities such as author spam have suffered yet another blow. It's already difficult to keep track who has been warned ever since all messages became private, without the possibility to make some public. The ability for the said author to delete the message and have no trace of it makes the entire system of warnings simply untenable. It is impossible to know who repeat offenders are. If you want us to continue doing this, we need to see whether the author has been warned already and s/he should not be able to delete that message.

Can someone suggest some things that would help you here, other than reversing course on private messages and deletion? I'm open to other features, ideas. But I don't think this alone is reason enough to change course.

>62 timspalding: Can someone suggest some things that would help you here, other than reversing course on private messages and deletion?

I can't think of anything. I can think of another reason to allow public messages: if I learn a member has died, posting an obituary to the deceased member's wall would be an effective way of letting others know about their passing.

I'd be fine with having the default be private, but I still want the option to make a message public.

>62 timspalding: The option to make messages public and those not deletable? I'm not sure I understand why defaulting to private is not enough without removing public option altogether. Other than that, I can only think of a completely separate system, along the lines of a flag. The message to the author would remain private but we cold also flag the profile as 'warned' or something.

But this is only one example. Any community effort needs public messages if it involves messages at all. Flagged pictures is another one that comes to mind of the top of my head. Without public messages, anyone other than the single person who sees it is blind, even though those are community messages as much as messages to any one person.

I guess that the Spam Fighters! group could have a dedicated thread where helpers could post: "I have sent anti-spam author advice to user XXXX." Searching such a thread would be trivial. The thread could include a message template and tips for friendly contact with authors.

>64 SandraArdnas: Flagged pictures is another one that comes to mind
Those should really be linked to the picture itself, as other than the first one most of them are really directed to the previous post. The original poster of the picture could be notified, but the comments themselves should be posted to the picture page not the user profile. Certainly the user that posted the picture shouldn't be able to delete them; maybe the person that posted the comment could.

Thank you for working to make things better and more intuitive. I appreciate this site and the people who keep it working and growing, and getting better. I have zero complaints.

>66 r.orrison: They are linked to the picture, but end up in the inbox too, so I assume they are private (and deletable)

>68 SandraArdnas:

I think that changed. For example, I can see the comment on this flagged image: https://www.librarything.com/pic/147598

>67 mckait: - Ditto.

It looks like the only way to navigate through messages in order to access older messages (let's say page three or later), is to either click on the membername on the left (sometimes with the added step of "See all...", or to click through the messages page by page.

Paging through to older messages means clicking on every single page until you find the correct one. At no time does the "1 - 2 - 3 >" list on top open up to display all pages, so here is no way of knowing how many pages of messages there are except clicking through each page individually.

Can this be changed? If not, can we have the option to display more than 25 messages per page?

Is there a way to search our private messages (without using browser add-ons or the like)?

>73 aspirit:

I don't see a search. There are ways to look at the lists of correspondents for the active and archived messages.

One can search the posts and replies in the Talk forum, of course.

James

>8 abbottthomas: I exchanged messages via our inboxes with another LT member about a book we were reading together and I mentioned some things that I intended putting in my review. I didn't make a note of it elsewhere because I assumed that I could just read the conversation again. But now I can't see my side of the conversation except for my last message though I can see the messages that the other member sent me; I'm guessing they've deleted it?

I asked this on 'Frequently asked questions' and the link to this thread was posted in reply. If the other member deleted my messages to clear up their inbox, that's fine. But is there any way for me to see what I wrote, now?