KEep in mind that the features you've mentioned are not gone for good...

Threads release date was pushed back so many times that once they brought the product back from being ultimately vaporware...

Threads7 was completely rewritten from the ground up, so not all features from both products (or from feature requests) where (or rather could be) added in without pushing the release date back yet again which wasn't a possibility.

The new features that are being added are old ones that where in both products, as well as some new ones to play catchup with long awaited feature requests and other products that've had them for eon's.

Some sort of anti-spamming mechanism would be of great help to all us admins.

Rick probably knows best what's feasible from a programmer's perspective and what's not, but here are a few ideas on how admins could be helped by such a feature:

- few posts, many PMs: such users will be flagged in the control panel allowing the admin to check them out. There could also be an auto-block feature, so if a new user with 0 posts sends more than 5 PMs, he account is automatically blocked with an alert sent to the admin.

- cut&paste spammers: I would bet that 99% of all PM spammers simply cut&paste the message each and every time. If the software detects that the last 3 outgoing PMs are identical, it automatically locks the account pending further investigation. This solution alone would solve the PM spam issue for most admins.

- only allowing users registered X days/months ago and/or having posted X messages to use the PM feature. This alone would prevent newbie spammer registrations from being a threat. The admin would have the ability to set a benchmark for users before they get the PM feature, for instance being registered for a minimum of 30 days and having at least 100 posts.

Hi Conrad,
Looks like you've already been through what I'm going through now!

few posts - many pms!
cut & paste spamming!

You've posted some good ideas there.