So how do you guys feel about this new thing AFF has where if you're not friends with someone, every message you send them will cost a karma point...it just bothered me when I went to send someone a message and saw that. That's like charging us one karma point to comment on someone's story. (Because you do know that's what the spammers are going to do next, right? They're going to spam tf out of our stories. Not to mention it'll probably help boost the number of people paying for their gold status especially if they're hyper about adding strangers to their list. FOH But of course, I'm just a conspiracy theorist) But anyway, do you like paying to send messages now or nah?

Q: Why do I need to spend karma or be a Gold member to send a wall or private message to non-friends?

A: First things first, to send wall or private messages to someone without any restrictions, just send them a friend request!

We've found that the most common complaint from our members is the volume of spam and troll messages sent to their profile wall or private inbox. Dedicated spammers often go down our list of members and send a spam message to each account amounting to thousands sent in a single day. Not only do we receive many complaints about this issue, but it also unnecessarily takes up server resources. As our community grows bigger, spam and other unwanted messages become a larger problem. To help alleviate these issues, sending a wall or private message to a non-friend will require spending 1 karma point for each message sent (Gold members do not have this restriction).

We initially thought to simply make all wall and private messaging friends-only by default but struck that idea down since many members may not want that and using the karma point method instead would be a good middle ground. Another method we could have tried would have been to increase lag times between each message sent but decided against it because 1) it will get harder for everyone to send even legitimate messages 2) even more limited resources will be needed just to remember when each IP address sent a message 3) we used lag times before and everyone hated it.

We know that it's easy enough to acquire karma points so this method isn't foolproof, but we think that members will at least think twice when sending a wall or private message to a non-friend. But as we mentioned before, why not skip all of this and just make new friends?