Solved: Allow PMs to be viewed as a single thread

[WillLem]

Maybe there’s already a way to do this?

When messaging the same person, particularly if there is a back and forth, all of the messages appear as separate entities and must be viewed by switching from Inbox view to Sent view.

By the time a considerable back and forth has been established, this can amount to many messages and can quickly become confusing, particularly if speaking to multiple people at once.

If all messages to a single person are grouped into a single thread, this would help greatly with following a conversation and also would help keep the message boxes tidy.

Happy to help with this if necessary.

[mobius]

I second this. Im even surprised no one or myself pointed this out sooner.

[kaywhyn]

Maybe there’s already a way to do this?

When messaging the same person, particularly if there is a back and forth, all of the messages appear as separate entities and must be viewed by switching from Inbox view to Sent view.

By the time a considerable back and forth has been established, this can amount to many messages and can quickly become confusing, particularly if speaking to multiple people at once.

If all messages to a single person are grouped into a single thread, this would help greatly with following a conversation and also would help keep the message boxes tidy.

Happy to help with this if necessary.

Unless I'm completely misunderstanding your suggestion, doesn't changing the setting for displaying personal messages in your forum profile to "as a conversation" achieve what you want? I think the default is "at once," but when I changed it to "as a conversation" it seems to achieve what you want. For example, I clicked on any PM that starts with a "Re" and there all the PM replies I had with the other person are all displayed together

[WillLem]

doesn't changing the setting for displaying personal messages in your forum profile to "as a conversation" achieve what you want? I think the default is "at once," but when I changed it to "as a conversation" it seems to achieve what you want.

Brilliant! Thanks kaywhyn, this solves it

This topic can be closed as resolved unless anyone else wants to add anything.

[Simon]

Theoretically, one can file this as a GUI bug against Simple Machine Forums if it's still in their most recent release (2.1.4; we're on 2.0.18):

• Rename "All at once" to "By date of receipt", and change the 3-element drop-down into 3 radio buttons.
• Always save outgoing messages, to make the view (as conversation) work at all. Remove the checkbox to save outgoing during message composition. Remove the checkbox (in user options) that default-checks that first checkbox during composition.
  
• Possibly make the conversation view the default; reason: people expect this nowadays, and didn't expect it 15-20 years ago.

-- Simon

[mobius]

Also never even knew about these options despite being on this forum for 10+ years now. Guess it never was really *that* big of a problem for me to think to look around for more options.