Personal messages, often abbreviated as PMs, are the means by which two members of the chat forum can engage in private conversation with each other.
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How to send a personal message
Communication via personal message is only available to registered members of the chat forum. Once registered and logged into the forum, the personal message system can be reached by clicking the new messages link to the top right of all forum pages. A message can also be sent to a member by clicking the "PM" button that appears to the bottom left of all of their public forum posts. The PM button looks like this:
Abuse
Personal messaging is provided to the members of the chat forum as a service intended to enhance the community experience. This privilege is not to be abused. Solicitation, spamming, harassment, and promotion of services that compete with Toytown Germany are strictly forbidden. Any member receiving an inappropriate personal message should immediately forward that message to a member of the moderation team. Note that the no personal attacks rule does not apply to personal messages, unless the attacks are enduring and constitute harassment.
Privacy
Toytown Germany takes the privacy of its members extremely seriously. All messages are normally only accessible to the individual members who send and receive them. The messages are, however, part of the system database and as such they are property of Toytown Germany. The administrator, technically-speaking, and if so inclined, could locate the personal messages in the database and read them. The administrator may only do this, however, in order to deal with abuse as described above. To date this has never been necessary. Messages are private, but not necessarily secret. Note that the database is only accessible to one of the two site administrators, not to the entire moderation team.
Openness and information sharing
Personal messages are not intended to deprive the community of valuable information or experiences that could benefit the entire group. Please do not use personal messages if the content of the message can be helpful to others. Instead, please post all such information to the public forum. When organising social events, all discussion is best carried out via the public forum. This generates interest in the event and attracts more people. The PM system should only be used for exchange of personal information such as mobile phone numbers.
Posting of private messages to the public forum
Private messages should not be posted to the public forum without consent of the original author. If you send a message to someone, and you then later find that the recipient has copied your message to the public forum, you may use the report function to request that a moderator remove the publicly posted copy. If you wish to bring a private message to the attention of the public forum, please ask for the author's permission first. Failing that, state the general gist of the message in your own words, don't quote it verbatim.
System modification of message contents
The TT chat forum and personal messaging system is powered by Invision Power Board software. This software comes with an automated word replacement feature. The system can be configured such that certain words, when posted via the chat forum, are automatically replaced. For example, the misspelling "teh" is automatically replaced with "the". You can try sending yourself a personal message in order to see this in action. There are approximately 40 other words that are currently automatically replaced on the TT forum. These are mostly misspellings such as comming, accomodation, appartment, pitty, thier, tittle, wierd, and wallmart. Note that these word replacements are carried out uniformly across both the public forum and the personal messaging system. It is not possible to replace words only in the forum or only in personal messages. Although the contents of public forum posts are sometimes edited by the moderation team, the contents of personal messages are never edited in this way. In fact, the moderation team can't even see the personal messages, see the statement on privacy above.