Back in August we introduced real-time private messages, allowing messages and live 1:1 chat to become the same system. This had a tremendous boost to read rates to a record high of 73% of sent messages are read. At this very moment there are over 195,000 active conversations over our network of sites.

Part of this new system required a new database structure which we had to run in parallel with the old one. We have now switched over to the new version and hopefully you will have not noticed anything different. Behind the scenes over 600,000 messages were seamlessly migrated. One bug was found which was causing sent items to be auto read by the sender which was quickly fixed and thank you to the member who spotted that.

The important change this new database offers is the ability for you to delete sent messages. They are removed from your sent items but the actual message is still in the receiver’s inbox. This allows you greater control on seeing who is reading and not reading your messages. In addition the sorting features are now fully operational. You can quickly filter read and unread messages in both the inbox and sent items.

The other major change is the counting of unread messages. In the past the system counted the total number of unread messages, now it counts the total number of unread conversations. So if someone sends you 4 messages it will report as 1.

As a closing remark we encourage every member to reply to messages, even if you are not interested in dating the other person. A simple, “Thank you for your message but you’re not for me” will help people considerably, rather than getting no reply.