We're having an issue where some members mistake the field in a user's profile for posting a public message, for a shortcut to sending a PM. As you can imagine, this has the potential to be quite embarrassing for the parties concerned (and has proven so at least once already), so I'd like to be able to disable this feature somehow. I'm assuming that the simplest way would be to remove the field that allows the message to be posted in the first place, but I can't see any way to do it.

I'd appreciate some advice on this issue, either in the form of instructions to remove the field in question, or a better way to achieve the desired outcome.

Kev

It’s part of the Status Updates feature. If you disable that globally, that box will go away. 

By the way: You can also set it to “require approval”. Maybe that helps as well. 

Thanks! I believe we've already disabled the status updates feature (for similar reasons), but I'll check again.

Kev

OK, this turned out to be a per-group setting, which I don't remember being the case, but I've disabled it for all our member groups now, and hopefully that will be the end of the problem.

Kev

So, I've set the "Can post status updates?" feature to 'off' for each of our member groups, but the 'post a public message' field is still visible and active on member profiles. Should I recache or something?

Kev

Ah, I just figured it out! I didn't disable this feature for the Administrator group, of which I'm a member! All sorted now. I wish there was a more global way of switching this off, however, than having to edit every group.

Kev