They may know that they can use private messages, yet ignore the Welcome message, because they know it's a "canned" message, and assume it doesn't say anything important. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" /> I often ignore such welcome messages out of hand. I suspect they are aware of the feature because the screen is presented to them first thing when they log in. At any rate, I know private messaging is really widely used on my boards, which surprises me really. The other option is sending email to all users which is built into 5.0, but I feel... invasive, I guess, using that.
The funny thing about this topic is that the framework for it is already built into the program. How to send messages to "groups" is defined in w3t.pm (versions 4 and 5) but then there's no later implementation in sendprivate.pl, and only certain admin functions use those group definitions. It looks for all the world like Rick meant to set this up and then later forgot.
Phoenix
