New Messaging System Coming Soon

Hi all,

We've got a new exciting feature improvement to announce regarding the 'Mailbox' which we are due to update over the next coming weeks.

As technology progresses, so does our habits and the way that we interact with one another online.  This has advanced us forward to overhauling the mailbox into a new messaging system which will make it much easier to communicate with other members (and also groups of members).  Those familiar with mobile messaging services like and iMessage will be the most accustomed to these changes.

In summary:

- All of your messages to another member will be combined into a single message.

- Manage all of your album invites and friend requests all in one place.

- Quickly search through your message history.

- For the first time, you can now create 'Group Message' so you can communicate with several members at the same time.

- You can easily see your online friends for a quick chat.

- Effortlessly browse your messages without having to change pages.

- Plus many more features to discover.

Being able to communicate with other members is one of the most important features that we can have on the site, which is why we've put in lots of effort to ensure that this is as best as it can be for you.  Simplicity is the key, which is why we've streamlined communication from one into one simple message (no longer will you need to spend time tracking back through old messages).

Considering that now over 65% of our members use the site on a mobile and tablet (which is still steadily growing), we've copied traits of the main mobile messaging services and prioritised our design for mobile devices.  For everyone, we've made sure that it's quick and easy to check your messages without changing the page and losing track of where you were (or who you were checking out!).

Here's a sneak peak of what's to come: 

Desktop:

Mobile: 

Group messages:

To help answer any common questions:

- What happens to all of my existing messages?

Once we update the site to the new messaging system, it will take some time for us to migrate all of your existing messages over into the new format.  Rest assured no messages will be lost during this process; they will all be combined into a single message and shown on your account shortly.  Until the migration is complete, the old mailbox will still be available.

- Can I opt out and keep the old format?

After the migration has been completed, the old faithful mailbox will be permanently retired.

- What has happened to the Messenger?

The messenger has been a great servant to us all, but has unfortunately reached the end of life.  The new messaging feature will now take over as the primary way to quickly message other members.

- Can I still block members?

The existing privacy options will still be available on the new messaging system.

- What if I don't want to be included in a group message?

If you do not want to be part of a group message, you can easily leave and remove yourself from that group.

- Can I still have separate messages with the same user?

Now that the new message system combines all of your messages with one user, there is no longer the option to have separate messages with the same user.  You should find that it is now much easier to keep track of your communication history.

- If it's not broken, don't fix it?

As creatures of habit, we don't like change.  We all get nostalgic and often say we prefer the old ways, but we assure you that once you are familiar with the way the new messaging system works and how quick it is, you won't want to look back.

• Have any suggestions?

We love hearing feedback and constructive criticism.  Once you're familiar with how the new messaging system works, please feel free to drop us a message and let us know what you like and what else you think we can improve.

• What other changes can we expect to see?

You may have noticed that we've been fairly quiet updating a few other areas of the site, such as stories, and groups.  As we progress through the year, we've got plenty more improvements up our sleeves to update more areas of the site.  Profiles, chatroom, gallery and searches - there's plenty more to come!

Thanks for reading.

Thank you for your hard work. As a fellow developer, I know you usually just get feedback when issues arise and thanks are sparse. I appreciate all you do and acknowledge the hard work, long hours, stress behind it.

This is great to hear, I was just thinking and wrote a thread to ask a similarly related question, but great to hear. Keep up the amazing work!!!

Already gave detailed comments on SS, but I am pleased with the direction.

is this for all members or only the elite - gold ones ?

Quote by HaleysPrettyGirl

is this for all members or only the elite - gold ones ?

For all members - the same messaging restrictions will still apply, i.e. 10 messages per 24 hour cycle.

Also, THIS LOOKS AWESOME!

Not looking forward to this ..

What about people who ARE NOT FAMILIAR with iMessage or ?

Guess those people and myself are screwed when it comes to messaging friends .

Quote by Denim_Daisy10

Not looking forward to this ..

What about people who ARE NOT FAMILIAR with iMessage or ?

Guess those people and myself are screwed when it comes to messaging friends .

I await a response to your point before wondering if I will be at a disadvantage with my ONLY access to the internet being via my desktop computer.

Not sure if I entirely get how the old format will be transferred to the new. Like, what if you have multiple mail conversations with the same person going on at the same time? Will all those responses from the separate conversation get interlaced? Or will each entire conversation show up as a single post (and whose post is it gonna be then)?

Sounds great! Thank you for the ongoing improvements!

It'll be nice to be able to save the convos again, and in a much organised way, too.

I do have a question somewhat related, and probably not very popular, but is there any chance we can get the 'invisibility cloak' back? Thanks!

Oohhh, pretty.

iMessage comes from APPLE so, if you are an iPhone user(as I am) then you know how to use.

I am looking forward to playing around w/ the new chat system.

another question ? do we need to STAR messages we want saved again like the last upgrade or are all messages going to be saved this time regardless of their status in our boxes ?

Sounds like an improvement overall, as long as the search works well. The current mailbox system is not good, with no search facility and no way to sort messages into folders, so finding stuff in my messages is very difficult. And I won't mourn the loss of messenger.

I'm not sure about all messages with the same user being in one stream. That makes it more like or or google chat, less like email. I will miss the ability to have different threads with the same user, for example, one thread for general chat and another for a back-and-forth roleplay story. I guess those of us who want to do that will just switch to .

Quote by PJH

Quote by Denim_Daisy10

Not looking forward to this ..

What about people who ARE NOT FAMILIAR with iMessage or ?

Guess those people and myself are screwed when it comes to messaging friends .

I await a response to your point before wondering if I will be at a disadvantage with my ONLY access to the internet being via my desktop computer.

The messaging system will work fine on desktop.

I'm sure anyone who has ever sent a text, , iMessage or email in the past will be just fine too, but there are plenty of people here to ask questions of if you get stuck.

What happens to our existing chat rooms. The mail system definitely need a major update and I welcome any change to that. I will be happy to have a message system that makes some sense., but I do what to keep the chat rooms, that is what most people come here to enjoy.

sounds like cool changes, just hope it wont take me ages to work them all out lol.

Will we be working on ways to keep better track of our story stats, things like who is currently reading, who has read it... traffic ext...

thanks

Quote by strokecds

What happens to our existing chat rooms. The mail system definitely need a major update and I welcome any change to that. I will be happy to have a message system that makes some sense., but I do what to keep the chat rooms, that is what most people come here to enjoy.

This does not, I don't think, have anything to do with the chatrooms. It is being implemented on Stories Space, too, and we don't have chatrooms. It is just replacing the Mailbox and Messenger.

Quote by Fiona69m

sounds like cool changes, just hope it wont take me ages to work them all out lol.

Will we be working on ways to keep better track of our story stats, things like who is currently reading, who has read it... traffic ext...

thanks

I suspect, wistfully, that things like that are far down the priority list, given our minority status. In time perhaps.

As someone above mentioned, I'm a bit concerned about "All of your messages to another member will be combined into a single message". In some cases, one may have but a single thread with someone. However, with others there may be various and sundry topics being discussed which would be, in a word, disastrous if combined.

Quote by BethH

As someone above mentioned, I'm a bit concerned about "All of your messages to another member will be combined into a single message". In some cases, one may have but a single thread with someone. However, with others there may be various and sundry topics being discussed which would be, in a word, disastrous if combined.

This seems to be the main concern with the proposed new messaging platform.

We all changed platforms to the current version of Lush not so long ago.

I feel that a large portion of this great community are still skeptical to change due to the bumpy ride we all had over the last migration a few months back, and rightly so.

If that is the largest concern then Lush is in a fantastic place compared to where we were in late Summer '21 (northern hemisphere)!

Just have some optimism.

There will be various reasons for this change.

Most of those being the exact reasons why , I-Message, Facebook Messanger and others are so hugely stable and popular.

For Admin/Devs

I'd be willing to be part of testing, if it hasn't already passed that stage!

It's an exciting change, for me at least.

Quote by Georgia_27_8

Quote by BethH

As someone above mentioned, I'm a bit concerned about "All of your messages to another member will be combined into a single message". In some cases, one may have but a single thread with someone. However, with others there may be various and sundry topics being discussed which would be, in a word, disastrous if combined.

This seems to be the main concern with the proposed new messaging platform.

We all changed platforms to the current version of Lush not so long ago.

I feel that a large portion of this great community are still skeptical to change due to the bumpy ride we all had over the last migration a few months back, and rightly so.

If that is the largest concern then Lush is in a fantastic place compared to where we were in late Summer '21 (northern hemisphere)!

Just have some optimism.

There will be various reasons for this change.

Most of those being the exact reasons why , I-Message, Facebook Messanger and others are so hugely stable and popular.

For Admin/Devs

I'd be willing to be part of testing, if it hasn't already passed that stage!

It's an exciting change, for me at least.

It's not the style messaging itself that I'm concerned about. It's the potential loss of conversations that are dear to me.

With the migration to Lush v2 I lost many of such conversations. Luckily, v1 would send all incoming messages to one's email address as well, so unless my conversation partners removed the message they were replying to, I still have all of those conversations in that inbox.

The current version of Lush however does not send the message itself to one's email address. It only sends a default email message saying one should check their Lush inbox. So this time I do not have my own backup in case the migration to this new messaging system will again mean that I will lose conversation that are dear to me (or scramble them up in such a way that they no longer make sense). That's what I'm concerned about.

Perhaps there could be an option to export existing conversations, or have them send to one's email address, before this migration. If so, then I hope this will be communicated very clearly, because the notion that one had to mark the messages that we wanted to keep during the previous migration, as HaleysPrettyGirl mentioned above, was not something I knew about. So when the migration happened, all my folders were gone. They were said to be restored, but I haven't seen them since.

Quote by noll

Quote by Georgia_27_8

Quote by BethH

As someone above mentioned, I'm a bit concerned about "All of your messages to another member will be combined into a single message". In some cases, one may have but a single thread with someone. However, with others there may be various and sundry topics being discussed which would be, in a word, disastrous if combined.

This seems to be the main concern with the proposed new messaging platform.

We all changed platforms to the current version of Lush not so long ago.

I feel that a large portion of this great community are still skeptical to change due to the bumpy ride we all had over the last migration a few months back, and rightly so.

If that is the largest concern then Lush is in a fantastic place compared to where we were in late Summer '21 (northern hemisphere)!

Just have some optimism.

There will be various reasons for this change.

Most of those being the exact reasons why , I-Message, Facebook Messanger and others are so hugely stable and popular.

For Admin/Devs

I'd be willing to be part of testing, if it hasn't already passed that stage!

It's an exciting change, for me at least.

It's not the style messaging itself that I'm concerned about. It's the potential loss of conversations that are dear to me.

With the migration to Lush v2 I lost many of such conversations. Luckily, v1 would send all incoming messages to one's email address as well, so unless my conversation partners removed the message they were replying to, I still have all of those conversations in that inbox.

The current version of Lush however does not send the message itself to one's email address. It only sends a default email message saying one should check their Lush inbox. So this time I do not have my own backup in case the migration to this new messaging system will again mean that I will lose conversation that are dear to me (or scramble them up in such a way that they no longer make sense). That's what I'm concerned about.

Perhaps there could be an option to export existing conversations, or have them send to one's email address, before this migration. If so, then I hope this will be communicated very clearly, because the notion that one had to mark the messages that we wanted to keep during the previous migration, as HaleysPrettyGirl mentioned above, was not something I knew about. So when the migration happened, all my folders were gone. They were said to be restored, but I haven't seen them since.

You can copy and paste them to your personal email and save as drafts etc...

I used to do that with the black boxes in L1, because those were only saved for one week.

Quote by noll

It's not the style messaging itself that I'm concerned about. It's the potential loss of conversations that are dear to me.

With the migration to Lush v2 I lost many of such conversations. Luckily, v1 would send all incoming messages to one's email address as well, so unless my conversation partners removed the message they were replying to, I still have all of those conversations in that inbox.

The current version of Lush however does not send the message itself to one's email address. It only sends a default email message saying one should check their Lush inbox. So this time I do not have my own backup in case the migration to this new messaging system will again mean that I will lose conversation that are dear to me (or scramble them up in such a way that they no longer make sense). That's what I'm concerned about.

Perhaps there could be an option to export existing conversations, or have them send to one's email address, before this migration. If so, then I hope this will be communicated very clearly, because the notion that one had to mark the messages that we wanted to keep during the previous migration, as HaleysPrettyGirl mentioned above, was not something I knew about. So when the migration happened, all my folders were gone. They were said to be restored, but I haven't seen them since.

The star system to keep a message actually relates to the current mailbox, not the v1 version, however it was easier to overhaul it completely to make up for the messenger being so chronic to use, so it's kind of a moot point anyway.

The current mailbox doesn't support folders, so all messages were just put into your inbox when we migrated. Everything should be there, just not in a separate folder.

We've tried to give people ample warning so that any messages you want to keep, you can save elsewhere.

I've just screenshot a few.

Quote by Jen

The current mailbox doesn't support folders, so all messages were just put into your inbox when we migrated. Everything should be there, just not in a separate folder.

Plenty of conversations got lost for me unfortunately.

A problem I have at the moment.

If I am in the ladies room and lose my connection it automatically reconnects but when reconnected, it only shows the room names and not the names of women in the ladies room.

I have to delete and re-enter to see the names of women in the ladies room.

Why?

I have a suggestion if it’s not already included, it would be beneficial to be able forward a mail as one can in normal email accounts.

Quote by MinaMurray

I have a suggestion if it’s not already included, it would be beneficial to be able forward a mail as one can in normal email accounts.

I think, but cant guarenee that this is part of the update...

Its been a long week, so forgive me if wrong