Forum Feature Suggestion (for Visitor Messages)
 

On days like today (Halloween, Christmas, New Year's, etc...) I tend to feel like sending holiday greetings to my friends on Anime Suki.

Alas, if you have a large number of friends, this can be a tedious affair, especially when you factor in the one minute time limit between Visitor Messages.

For me to send a Visitor Message holiday greeting to all my AS friends, I'd have to be at it for over 2 hours steady. Via Private Message, I could do it in significantly less time, but it would still take a fair amount of time.

With this in mind, I have an idea... Why not put into place a "Send to all Friends" feature? Like, you could write up a visitor message, and click a "Send to all Friends" button, and it would automatically paste it to the wall of all your AS friends (that are listed as such, of course).

This is no big deal, mind you, but it would be nice. :)

What do other people here think?

Well technically it's not open to abuse, but generally I've come to hate/ignore mass messages (habbit from IM).

It is a little more tricky to implement then it seems too. I think it would be easier/better to just remove the "time limit" when sending VM/PM to a friend.

I have to admit that I too am not really a big fan of "mass mailings" and my first reaction when I read this proposal was basically "eww... spam". :heh:

While I agree that the reciprocating nature of the friendship system makes abuse less likely (except of course in case of account compromise), I think the nature of public profiles make it rather annoying for a whole group of friends to have the same posts on their wall. I also have nightmares about "send to all your friends" chain letters that could then get re-sent to "all friends" (some of which will be the same and some different) causing some people to have the same mass mailing appear on their wall multiple times.

All that to say... I think Visitor Messages should be used primarily for one-to-one public communication, and one-to-many communication should occur either through the forums or through social groups. And while I'm not technically opposed to reducing the time limit for sending VMs to friends, if you tell me the motivation is "so I can mass-mail all my friends with minimal effort" I'm not sure that's such a great reason. (Does being your friend on AS come with a disclaimer that I'm automatically opted-in to your newsletter? :heh: Also, what if you make a mistake and "accidentally" mass-mail everyone something. Kind of messy to clean up or edit, since each copy will be a separate independent copy in the database, not linked at all... and what if you have 100+ friends? :heh: )

So while I understand what you're trying to do, I'm not sure that it's really using the technology in the way it's intended, and I am a bit fearful of the potential consequences even if it's limited to mutual friends. So for now it isn't something I'd be interested in investigating, but that doesn't preclude any of the other staff from looking into it if they want.

It's not quite on that level, but PM's already allow mass message sending at a decent rate (5 people at a time). So if those people are really that important, then that should suffice?

I'm also just a bit wary of the spam nature this feature could entail despite what your intentions being better than that.

What if we were to cut the Visitor Message time limit in half to 30 seconds?

That would at least make things a little easier for people who want to send out a lot of holiday greetings to a lengthy list of AS friends. It would basically cut the time in half for them.

I also think that a 30 second time limit on VMs would probably be enough to discourage genuine spammers (not that I see many, if any, of these on Anime Suki as it is).