I thought for awhile there that PBS was purging PM's that were more than _____months old. They must have stopped doing that awhile back, but I didn't realize...why did they stop doing this? I don't pay a lot of attention to PMs and usually delete them as they come in, especially those numerous ones that say nothing but "thank you" after someone receives a book, but sometimes if I'm in a hurry or if there's a bunch at once I'll forget. I just looked at my PM box and I had 195 messages in there, some from as far back as May of last year. These aren't archived messages--I do have a folder with four of those in it--and in looking at those, there isn't a reason to save the ones I saved anymore either. LOL

I guess I hadn't paid attention because I thought those older messages were getting purged after a couple of months? Why would they NOT purge them, since they give us the opportunity to archive those that we might want to save? Anyway, I'm off for a mass deleting session. LOL

Edited to add--cripes, I've got almost 300 in the "from me" box, some back to December 2006! Why on earth would I want those....I wish there were a way to delete whole pages at one time instead of having to click on each msg individually!

Cheryl
 

if you click on all it will place a check on that page (check to make sure it doesn't do all pages-I never have had that many to delete at a time) and then click the delete button.

I would add - I check all then go back and check any that I want to keep -then I move those to the archive.

Thank you, jubead! That saved me heaps of time! I didn't check back here til I deleted all the ones in my inbox by individually checking each one and then hitting delete when I had the whole page checked, but I had a lot more "sent" ones to get rid of and that only took a few clicks. Sometimes my natural blondeness comes through. LOL

Cheryl

I glad you posted - when I looked at mine it was becoming large - so I just did some house cleaning myself :)

I didn't know they purged any PMs.  One member once told me she had over 1000 (or was it 2000?) PMs--apparently she keeps every one. 

For awhile they were purging them (and forum posts) after a couple of months, and if you wanted to save any, you could archive them. But I guess at some point they stopped doing that.

Personally I can't imagine why anyone would want to save all of them....I have a couple that are like "when you read the book, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it" or things like that...since I often don't get to reading books til months after I get them, I save those, because it's easier than writing down the member's name and such. But just the everyday PMs...why save those?

Cheryl

That must have been before I joined because I still have PMS I've written from day one.  I just didn't think about deleting them until there were already 1,000's of them. They rack up pretty quick when you play alot of games.  I need to just go page by page and delete them all.  I'm better about deleting the ones I've received since I just do it when I'm reading it. 

Ok this is annoying. I don't want to delete the 1st page or two because as I said I play games and there are PMS there I want to keep for now. So I page back a few pages, delete the whole page and it brings me back to page 1.  Why can't it bring me back to the page after the one I deleted? I deleted a few pages then lost my patience with having to page back a few pages every time.

Which is exactly why I haven't wasted the time to delete them, Mary. I have an unbelievable number of them, but since you have to move off page one everytime you delete a page, it's just to much time. I just leave them there and let them collect dust.

ETA: Dawn, I don't delete as I read, I just leave and of course, as I said, I can't get to the old ones now, and I have over 8,800 PMs that's just crazy. And there's no way to go thru them except page, by page, by page, since they don't have a drop down to go to any specific pages. Yep, I'm just sunk and drowning in PMs, but since there's nothing I can see to do about it, I just continue to let them pile up.

How do you archive?

you check the messages you want to archive and press the button called archive. Those messages will then be under the archive tab.

Doesn't keeping all those PM's use up a lot of computer memory?  Or is it only on-site memory?       D.

site -only the email you are sent will take up space on your HD.  they aren't accessible offline

Is there anyway to delete all of my sent pms at once? I have about 16,000. I run a lot of games and have blast pm's so they add up fast and I never noticed. I know I click all on a page and delete them one page of 50 at a time but with 16,000 that will take a long time.

Alice

Blast pm's show up as one for each person. I have big blast lists.

Alice

Doesn't keeping all those PM's use up a lot of computer memory?  Or is it only on-site memory?

Actually, it is not memory, but storage space. And storage space is now cheap. My first hard drive was 5 MB and it cost $2,700 with the educational discount. I still have problems accepting the fact that my portable chip has 8 GB and only cost me $20.

Plus the messages are mostly, if not all, just text, this takes almost no room at all on a hard drive, especially with compression. I'm not a systems person, but I'd bet my next social security check that when you look at a message, the PBS system just calls up a template and displays the message text in it. Unless the text has numerous paragraphs, your icon, or any special images at the bottom of your message, takes up more space on the PBS hard drives than the message itself.

I cleaned out my To Me box not long ago, but it took forever because you can only delete a page at a time.  I don't delete them as I read them - I just read and then leave it there.  I have 12000 in my From Me box (I'm a games mod and run games that involve a lot of mass PMs), but I don't feel like wasting the time to clear them out.  I did notice that the Personal Messages page opens a ton faster after I deleted the ones to me.

I'm not a systems person, but I'd bet my next social security check that when you look at a message, the PBS system just calls up a template and dispalys the message text in it.

Yes, unless this site is not normal in some way, the messages are not stored formatted ... it is just the text. Same with the forum posts, by the way. The formatting is all applied when you view a thread in your browser. What the PBS database stores is just the text of the posts. Probably in html format.

That is why, for example, when you change your icon or signature, the new ones show up no matter how old the thread is that you might be viewing. None of that stuff is stored with the forum posts.

PMs do take up server space. Can you imagine in a site this big with all the system pms how much space that is, even if an individual message is quite small? If they needed the server space they surely would purge them so they must not but I could never live with myself if I had all those old messages hanging around. Messy, messy, messy people!

It's called CYA.  I had an incident about a year and a half ago in the games forum.  I still have all related PMs to the other person involved and all the games mods.  You just never know, so the best policy is to CYA.