I am thinking about limited the number of messages per day per member.

What limit would you suggest for:

(a) new members
(b) members after a certain time period (1-2 weeks)
(c) long-term members and active members

What do you think ?

wouldn’t that dissuade people from joining or taking part if they can freely post on other sites?

A limit for brand new members might be good - stop people spamming, but i think it would put peeps off a bit, they might see it as the first step to charging for being able to send more messages.

Which would suck, obviously.

There was a message limit once upon a time wasn't there? I'm sure we could only receive 3 messages at a time..then had to delete them to receive some more???..which was a pain..

maybe new members should have an initial limit of perhaps 5 messages..then after a 3 month period..increase it..long term members should defo have an umlimited amount of messages that they can receive..only fair if they have been continously active on the site..

I was thinking, logically, wouldn’t new members get a lot of messages during the first few days that they’re on the site? I’d assume that a lot of people using FB would be keeping an eye on new registrations, and that they’d get a lot of attention (ergo a lot of messages)? Personally, now I’ve been here a while, I use the messaging system less and less, since I’ve now built up trust with the people that I want to have contact with and we email and/or phone each other, use the forum, etc.

From a technical point of view, I guess perhaps Toby might be trying to relieve some of the load on the server, in order to optimise the loading speed of the site? Don’t know what the server configuration is, so can’t say, but if that was the case, I’d opt for fewer messages and faster site 

i personally dont think its a good idea, cos that would be like those other sites and it will prob put people off.

but is there a reason for you wanting to do it

For the reasons that DarkHorse stated it would be a bad idea to impose a limit on messages received, but there'd be no problem with being able to send 3 a day for the first couple of weeks, just to prevent the sort of mass spamming that can occur. (although I've never seen it happen here, is it just good moderating?)

A lot of people lurk for a bit before they pluck up the courage to post anyway...

Having said that, there'd be nothing to stop the dedicated spammer from just not posting at all for two weeks and then littering the boards with rubbish.

It would still be for free of course....but spamming is made even harder as people would need to spend some time on the website and use it in an active way in order to reach a status to send lots of messages....

they live under bridges?

I think Toby is talking about messages on the main site

Its NOT about posting on the boards
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i think the best thing is no limit, and have an image appear next to every x messages that you have to read and then type what it says into a box, as a way of stopping spammers who typically use automated methods of sending lots of messages. That's how other places normally deal with it. Another idea is setting a rate limit, rather than a fixed amount per day, such as x messages per hour or something. That way you're just making people pace themselves a bit.

While it initially sounded a good idea, wouldn't it just lead to them setting up more profiles and sending the same number of messages as before?