High Sierra Topix

My apologies if the solution is obvious and something I can fix myself, but I have searched this forum and not found a solution. When I attempt to compose a (private) message I get the following: "You are not authorised to send private messages."

I looked at the FAQ and the nearest match seemed to be under "I cannot send private messages!", which says:

"There are three reasons for this; you are not registered and/or not logged on, the board administrator has disabled private messaging for the entire board, or the board administrator has prevented you from sending messages. Contact a board administrator for more information."

To my knowledge I'm registered and logged in, and I am trying to respond to a message someone has sent me, so I believe private messaging is not disabled for the entire board. That leaves the third option, but I think I'd remember if I had been blocked for sending private messages, and from my history I appear to have no sent private messages.

Every time someone sends me a PM I feel a bit bad about being unable to respond, so I figure I should finally try to figure out what's going on.

Often boards will make users send 10 posts before they get PM privileges (to prevent spam). So maybe just keep yukkin' it up?

Maybe @Copeg will pick up your issue. Eric seems dead stick lately.

@rlown, I tried to respond to your PM, and although I don't see a respond button anywhere, when I click on "Compose message" in the Private messages area of the site, I still see "You are not authorised to send private messages."

For what it's worth I tried logging out and back in before testing. I will shamelessly reply again in this thread to try @c9h13no3's suggestion.

Just a message to get to 10 posts.
Edit: it was a good idea, but alas, no success. I still can't help but think I must be doing something wrong somehow.

C9 has it right - there is a min number of posts before users are granted this permission. Rummaging around it looks like that value is 3, but I could be wrong with that exact figure (you seemed to have surpassed). Just to confirm, can you post back and quickly verify you are still having issues?

Also, perhaps when we send a private message to someone that is unable to respond by a private message it would be good to let us know. Otherwise we may be waiting for a reply in vain.

Even better, if someone receives a private message, it may be good to lift the PM block.

I have met some people on the trail and let them know that they may reach out to me by PM here. Most of them don't post much, if anything at all (lurkers). I never got a PM. I wonder whether this is the reason.

@copeg, thank you for looking into this. I just tried again and I don't seem to have a 'respond' button when viewing a private message, and when I attempt to compose a new private message I see some text that says, "You are not authorised to send private messages."

Also, hello, @tomba. It's been a while. Some not very good photos from the day we chanced upon one another.

Made a change to your account - you should have permissions now, but please post back to let me know otherwise. FWIW Looks like there may have been a system glitch to your account, which didn't seem to lift the post count restriction for private messages. This restriction was put in place to prevent spam, which became a problem a while back with new users registering then randomly sending private messages

Seems to be working fine now. Thanks for the help, @copeg.