Possible to Prevent Forum Users from Emailing Each Other?

[nabblenewbie]

Nabble looks absolutely amazing, and I'm very excited to try it out and create a forum of my own!

However, I have a major concern:

I'm involved in an industry where I have a lot of competitors who'd want to spam my users and try to steal them away. These competitors would see my forum as a place where they could "shoot fish in a barrel" by emailing each user individually through the forum, and I wouldn't know until it was too late because my competitors could register accounts and impersonate legitimate users.

Is there a way to disable user-to-user email contact altogether on the forum? I've looked at the Users - > Change Permissions option but don't see email permissions as an option to alter as being only for administrators, leading me to believe that this is not possible to change.

This could make the difference for me as to whether Nabble is the route I should take for creating a forum. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[GregChapman]

Is there a way to disable user-to-user email contact altogether on the forum?

No!

I've looked at the Users - > Change Permissions option but don't see email permissions as an option to alter as being only for administrators, leading me to believe that this is not possible to change.

Have you generated an account as an ordinary user? If you do you will see that only administrators have access to the mail addresses of users.

Therefore, other users cannot "spam" other users (I take spamming to mean "mass mailing"). They can email an individual user but they never learn the true email address of that user as all addresses are cloaked by the Nabble system. Similarly, a sender's address is cloaked under a Nabble address, so the recipient will clearly see it has come via the forum. They will be able to check on the forum what posts the sender has made and make a judgement about whether to trust them.

In all honesty, if an "undesirable" wants to reach all your users, it is better for them to post in the open forum.

As I suggested in my other answer to you, you should put in place adequate controls on who may join you then sit back and "trust your users and they will respect your rules". It's simple and it works!

[nabblenewbie]

Thank you for your very useful advice. The signature fix you suggested in the other thread worked simply and perfectly.

However, the fact that one "undesirable" could potentially email all of the others (even if only one-by-one and through the Nabble system) is still a grave concern for me.

I started a Facebook Page for my business a few years ago. Back then, with one click, anyone could see a list of all "fans" of a particular page. An undesirable took the time to, one-by-one, "friend", message, and invite each of my fans to his own Facebook Page, a strategy that worked for him to a large extent.

Additionally, I've faced this problem on Twitter as well, where, even still, with one click a user can see all of another user's followers. The same undesirable as above, as well as a few others, took the time to one-by-one "follow" all of my followers (which alerts the followers of the undesirables' existence, website, services, products, etc.)

The undesirables I have to deal with aren't people promoting pharmaceuticals - they're people promoting competing products and services, a serious problem for me.

It appears that under the Nabble system, it would be easy and effective for an undesirable to send a copy-pasted message informing my followers of his/her own website, product, and service to all of my followers - even if the undesirable had to send these messages one-by-one, it'd still be simple enough, and worth it for the undesirable to do. Finding new qualified leads in my industry is difficult, and each is valuable. I know I might seem paranoid, but as you can see above, I've faced this very problem before, multiple times.

Is there truly no CSS fix or other possible modification to prevent users from emailing each other? I'm not concerned about users spamming the forum, as I can easily moderate what I can see publicly. I'm concerned about what an undesirable would do behind the scenes.

Thank you for your help.

[Peter <Nabble>]

For now you can go to the permissions page (Options>Users>Change permissions) and change Show_group_members so no one can see the "People" link (maybe you want to keep it for administrators).
There will be no easy way to go through each of your members except by looking for posts where there will be a link to his profile.
We could hide the link to post a message (which personally I find useful for members to contact each other and just making it harder for the spammer may be enough) but it would be a premium user request. Specific customization is just for premium support.