Is Private Messaging Possible?

BobC

I see various posts which reference private messages, but it appears the only way to access them is to have someone private message me,  to which I can then respond.  It appears the "someone" is limited to a Quicken employee or moderator or an experienced user/moderator.  Is this correct?  Or is there a way for me to private message another user? 

The reason I am asking is my desire to thank Chris_QPW for his recent thread on Citibank Direct Connect failure, and his knowledgeable and useful posts, which I am sure helped get the issue the attention it needed to get fixed. In addition, his posts provided significant help to me to understand the differences between direct connect, express web connect, and web connect, all of which were valuable to my understanding of Quicken and its connectivity to my FIs.  That thread / discussion is now closed to further discussion, so I couldn't post this thought in that discussion, where it might otherwise belong.  Hence my desire to PM him.  And my question to this part of the forum.  Anyway, if you see this, Thanks Chris.

Thank you,

BobC

Chris_QPW

Well thank you very much @BobC I'm glad I could help you learn about Quicken.
It is always nice to have feedback.

But you are really giving me too much credit. And others should get a lot of credit too.
For instance @Boatnmaniac found a way to contact a person at Citi that really knew what was happening, and reported back.  And then there was (Jim I believe sorry for forgetting you handle) that pointed out that Express Web Connect keeping your transactions on the server (for about 30 days) might be something someone might want to avoid for security reasons.

And of course the moderators posting the announcement and comments in the thread to "assure" the people that it was being worked on.

In reality I believe that this really had no impact on how long it took to get fixed other than maybe when the right people a Citi were notified, and maybe not even for that.

What was happening is they had the server that was running the OFX server Direct Connect used down to change something, or several "somethings".  It is highly unlikely that they have a dedicated machine(s) just for Direct Connect.  One of these "somethings" might have been the connection to Quicken, but it might not have anything to do with it.  So I believe the timeline to fix it really just depended on when they were through with their maintenance.

Now on your question about PM first off let me point out you can get someone's attention on here if you put in a @ and then the user's name that will send them a notification and they will see it at the top of this forum when they come in.  This is the preferred way to "talk" to someone on here.

But the forum does have PMs, they probably aren't mentioned much because the people that know about them don't want to get spammed.  If you click on the the person's image in any of their posts that will take you to their profile. From there, there is a Message button that you can start a PM to them.

BobC

Hello & Thanks again to @Chris_QPW

1.  As for thanks to the rest of the users and the Quicken moderators who contributed to understanding this issue, what it was affecting, and getting it resolved, I totally concur.  So thanks to @Boatnmaniac and the other users and Quicken's moderators Sarah & Tyka as well.

2.  Yes, I can understand that it could have been, or more likely was an outage of some kind by Citibank, to address this and/or other issues, and may have resolved itself without any prodding, but it seems to me the visibility created by the collective expertise of the more experienced users, and the Quicken Moderators helped to assure it wasn't overlooked for a longer time, or ignored entirely.

In addition to prompting a "fix" of the problem, this issue and similar discussions are important, at least to me, to help us, the users, get a better picture of the multiple parties and complexity of processes the software is dealing with, and need for both developers and users to pay attention to the details in describing intended behavior of changes as well as observed behavior of changes and associated issues.  Also to understand the complexity of making revisions to the software, and addressing problems that may arise.

3.  I can only hope that Quicken developers are spending enough time understanding the Quicken problems and evaluations provided by you and other expert users, and that the changes they are making don't cause more failures and problems than they solve.  I'd hate to see such changes drive away enough users that Quicken fails. I don't think it would take too many more debacles like the mid December failure of connectivity between Quicken and Quicken Bill Pay, and the loss of Bill Pay functionality, to cause such a failure.  That would be sad, because Quicken is still, in my opinion, the best tool to see an overview of a user's financial activity in one place, (without putting it all in "the cloud"), and to drill down to details from transactions to paying bills timely, tracking checking, savings, credit card, and investment accounts, as well as other assets and liabilities, reconciling accounts, and so forth and so on, across a wide variety of FIs.  To me, keeping an eye on the whole picture AND the details, is a requirement in these days of constant war between the white hats and the black hats.

4.  With respect to PMs, I have looked all over your Profile page, and others, for a message or conversation button and don't see one - after a bit of reading on the Vanilla Forums user documentation, I have tentatively concluded that the ability to use PMs is a configuration feature that can be enabled by rank and probably administrators as well, and likely provided only to those of higher "rank" than me.  Regardless, the use of the @username to notify you or others is a tool that I will use in the future.  Thanks for that information.  I may eventually accumulate enough knowledge to become more dangerous. :-)

Thanks again,
BobC

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @BobC

Thank you for taking the time to leave some positive feedback!

Private messaging becomes available at 101 points, which are you pretty close to achieving! 

Rising Star: 101-999 points
Wow!  You're on the verge of breaking through the stratosphere!  You have even longer to edit your own posts and answers, and you can even private message other users.

To learn more about the ranks in the Community please see the link below:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7849424/introducing-community-ranks#latest

I hope this helps!

-Quicken Tyka