Improvements for PMs

[Aisha]

Right now, I feel that PMs are not very user (or even staff) friendly and I think the following improvements would be helpful in streamlining the messenger system for everyone.

• Improved search. On very very active forums users form entire communities online and for many of them PMs are their only way of interacting with their friends. Often they want to find old conversations or mentions of something specific. Right now if you search for a word then it just displays the PM list, it would be better if they displayed the individual PM in which the word is used. I also believe that wildcard searching is not supported here.
• Going to the first unread post in a conversation: This was improved upon in 3.2.1 but something was left out. In my opinion if you're clicking on a PM then the majority of the time you do not want to go to the first message, you want to go to first unread message. So in the dropdown menu which tells you that you have new PMs the link only takes you to the first message. Same with viewing PMs on the mobile skin. Please adjust these to go to the first unread message, I really don't think there's any question about this. It becomes especially painful when you have a 60 or even 100 page PM conversation (I do have a 1000 page one on my forum...) and you get redirected to the first post and have to alter the URL so you can get taken to the last post.
• Staff PMs: I would like to see an option for private staff PMs. When a staff member sends a warning PM to a user it would be nice if that PM was "locked" so that only other staff members can be invited into that PM. No regular users.
• Readding participants: Ok, I have seen it happen on multiple multiple occasions where someone has accidentally deleted themselves from a PM. Once deleted it is impossible to add them back in. I understand that this is to prevent harassing a certain user by repeatedly adding them into a conversation, but can something be done about the people who accidentally click delete? Maybe a confirmation screen (or popup) with an explicit warning that once deleted you cannot access the PM ever again?
• Archive limit: I know in 3.1 that clicking on archive conversation there is a limit to how many PMs get archived. I don't know if this was fixed, but please remove any limit if it exists. A user once wanted to archive a PM with 1500 replies and found he couldn't do it. I had to install a PM download hook and edit that person's limit of 400. (Thank you dawpi)
• Ok, at this point I started making suggestions for PMs. These have nothing to do with streamlining lol
• Keeping PMs alive: When the original sender of the PM deletes the PM from their inbox then all participants can no longer reply. I think that the conversation should be allowed to go on, but this isn't that big of a deal and it may be difficult to do?
• Other participants: It says in the PM list that the pm was "Started by ______, sent to ______ (and __ others)". It'd be nice to be able to click the "others" to see who they are. It's no different then clicking on the "replies" of a thread to see who has posted in that thread and how many times.