Sudden Private Message Member Restriction?

[Spin Attaxx]

So I'm in a group PM with some friends, and we were trying to add someone in... when apparently we hit the maximum number of people, and couldn't. Now, this seems odd to me, considering that there's another group PM I'm part of that has way more members than the one in question. So is this a glitch, or did we just decide to lower the maximum amount of people allowed in a PM?

[Failinhearts]

And in both situations, is it possible to lift these restrictions? (Or at least, increase the maximum up a bit?)

As somebody who has many group PMs for things like personal issues and events, this is becoming an issue as the number of participants grow.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Yeah, this is gonna make my group PMs like the one I have for Game Night issues harder to work with.

[Tara]

We thought it might be fitting to punish you all just because we felt like it.

Seriously, though, I don't know.  It's probably just a setting that got accidentally turned down.

[Chris]

This isn't a change that I'm happy to do, but I'll double the number of possible participants that can join in. I'm afraid that this change - much like adding the status updates - will take further attention away of the forum aspect and migrate it to be behind closed doors (whereas the status updates simply shifted interest).

If forum activity goes down as a result, I'll be lowering it back to 10 participants per conversation. As of now, it's at 20.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

1 hour ago, Chris said:

This isn't a change that I'm happy to do, but I'll double the number of possible participants that can join in. I'm afraid that this change - much like adding the status updates - will take further attention away of the forum aspect and migrate it to be behind closed doors (whereas the status updates simply shifted interest).

If forum activity goes down as a result, I'll be lowering it back to 10 participants per conversation. As of now, it's at 20.

Thank you for placing the participant level back up.

Although, I disagree with the forum activity. PMs are for that, being private conversations, something that's needed for people who don't feel comfortable posting private feelings, or situations in public, and only feel comfortable talking about it in groups of friends, as well as organizational purposes, such as my Game Night event. I've been in multiple PMs where people still post in the forum as often as always, so I don't see how the PMs impact that.

[Chris]

1 hour ago, Ryannumber1gamer said:

Although, I disagree with the forum activity. PMs are for that, being private conversations, something that's needed for people who don't feel comfortable posting private feelings, or situations in public, and only feel comfortable talking about it in groups of friends, as well as organizational purposes, such as my Game Night event. I've been in multiple PMs where people still post in the forum as often as always, so I don't see how the PMs impact that.

In an ideal situation, the forum would be just as active as it used to be - but this isn't the case. The more features we add further divides the usage, much like how the status updates have gradually become an area for voicing lengthy opinions that should be in topics. When we added those, we didn't anticipate that they would be as popular as they are; I'm concerned that the PM system having a higher capacity will shift more users to exclusively using that system and not participating outside.

I'm not saying that the PM system having an increased capacity will be an issue, but that it'll be one I'm monitoring going forward to ensure that it doesn't impact the forum activity in a negative manner.