Private Message facility

Most of the international forums have a private msg facility. This allows established members to talk to each other offline. This is relevant if two members want to share / exchange views that are not pertinent to a particular thread. In order to prevent the in-boxes from being spammed by over eager newbies, forums that offer this facility have  arestriction of min 100 posts or so before you can access this facility.

+1 Arun. Its a good suggestion. Lets hear it from Mods.

I would also second Arun on the suggestion.

I second this as well. Good suggestion.

Cheers,
Naveen

It is under consideration.  As pointed out by Arun, new members will have to qualify (post-counts) to get access to it.

Pankaj, I would like the criterion to be a bit better than just a post count - then there will be a scramble to reach that post count, and consequent deluge of nonsense posts - you would have done yourself a disservice by putting such a criterion. Even pure MOD discretion is better than a dumb post count.

Post-count + approval from Mods

Agree with Krishna. Pure post count works where people are self disciplined. Little chance of that happening here......lol.

It's not so.  There are exceptions everywhere.  Let's not be critical

Post-counts + approval of Mods, as stated before, will do the job fine, I suppose.

Mod approval doesn't sound like a solution to me. I am afraid it will either have long queues for moderation approval and hence dissatisfaction or moderators will be overburdened with another daily-routine work.

The international standard for giving out PM facility is normally based upon no of posts. What people do is, they do not count posts posted in a few off-topic forums (we have done that before) and keep a close watch on the newbies in various forums, they even issue warnings etc to newbies if the behaviour is not apt or they are posting only to increase number of posts. Mods' work increases in this solution too but forum becomes better/cleaner, overall. I suggest this approach.