I shouldn't have to "friend" someone before sending them a private message.  This website is for a community of professionals, not a social network.  It's fine to have a friend feature in general, but necessitating friendship before communication is a poor work model in any situation.  Chances are, I don't know who I'm contacting via Creative Crash and I shouldn't have to be their friend before saying hello.  When I do make them my friend I should be able to attach a message to my friend request.  As it stands I have to send or accept an anonymous friend request before even contacting someone.

Also, the ability to post my own email address and/or website in a visible place next to my portfolio is missing.  Whether I'm trying to create a small business through selling work on Creative Crash, or just putting a few odds and ends up to give back to the community, this isn't going to be the only place I have an online presence.  In either case, I will most likely wish to link people interested in me to my other portfolios and shops.  The bottom line is this: in this industry half of the battle is knowing people.  If you can't find out who someone is at a glance and can't contact them without becoming their "friend", then I don't see how Creative Crash is going to be useful for anything but insular leechers of the 3D community.

>> This website is for a community of professionals, not a social network.

Community of X = social network. However not all social networks need to be the same.

>> I shouldn't have to "friend" someone before sending them a private message.

Yes and no. One the otherhand you shouldnt be sending a person who you know private messages. Because thets diruptive to that person*. If you have something so sensitive that it cant face the light and day then this is the worng place to go about it.

However i agree with this, there are situations where its a good idea to send a PM. Just saying its a 2 edged sword.

*Im still getting a bit of unwanted PM from people i dont know, on subjects that would be better off discussed on boards. Yes i know its not a big deal to most users but at peak time years back I used to get 200 genuine PM's a day (not spam altough for me its the same thing) which made me kill more than a few acccounts.

          "One the otherhand you shouldnt be sending a person who you know private messages"

I'm going to take it that you meant "On the other hand you should not be sending private messages to a person who you do not know."  I can see many reasons to send a private message to someone I don't know.  I may want to talk to someone selling a product about the price, or a specific detail about the product.  I could want to complain about a purchasing problem. 

Or it could be even more mundane than that.  Today I posted a forum message where I modified and improved someone's rig that they posted here.  I don't know this person.  His rig does not mention any specific license or copyright, but technically it should still belong to him.  Even though I modified it, posting it may not technically be legal and even if it is legal, I would have liked his okay via pm or email before posting it for the world to see.  Instead I posted it to a forum message about his work.  Since a forum message isn't the place for a private message, I did not ask his permission.  But kind of layout can lead to both social and legal friction.

         "If you have something so sensitive that it cant face the light and day then this is the worng place to go about it."

I could agree with that, if I had some sort of choice in the matter.  I would use email or a real social network like linkedin to contact someone about private information that is not related to this site.  If I had the choice.  However, in order to email someone or find their linkedin account, I have to first friend them and then pm them.  Meanwhile they may not know who I am, or have any reason to friend me back without some sort of explanation.  Which I can't give them beforehand, because I can't pm them.  I could ask them for their email on a bug request, feature request, or forum post, but that's not the purpose of those mechanisms.

          "Im still getting a bit of unwanted PM from people i dont know, on subjects that would be better off discussed on boards. Yes i know its not a big deal to most users but at peak time years back I used to get 200 genuine PM's a day (not spam altough for me its the same thing) which made me kill more than a few acccounts."

I would say this is probably on the extreme end of a bell curve of pm's.  Even so, it doesn't make sense to cripple the pm system just so those on the peak end of the spectrum have less pm's.  This seems like just another flaw in the current pm system.  A pm system should be similar to a email system.  There should be features available to organize pms and blacklist users.  And sending a pm that should be a forum post is an indication that the users don't know the proper place for such discussions, not a flaw in the system.

Like i said agree with the notion of everybody should be able to mail everybody, its just a filtering issue nowdays.

However Im just pointing the obvious, not sure a forum is the right place to spawn private messages trough. See thing is all those people who do participate much in discussion are often ones that get targeted for PM traffic.

Every action has a reverse action and all actions have a downside

>> I would say this is probably on the extreme end of a bell curve of pm's

Well I used to write a lot of email, that was just the unwanted correspondence. Ive been i situation where wanted correspondence eats 4-5 hours of my life every day in and out. Its just to point out that the view on how to do things. Today i hardly read mail at all, because the entire notion is broken. If somebody who needs to get into contact can not, then they are not trying hard enough (if they cant try harder then they dont need to be in contact). Thing is I'm just pointing out that the pyramid looks indeed different for different perspectives.

However I have never really gotten HIGH volumes of mail, which starts somewhere around 10,000 mails a day (taht allready forces you to screw even important mail as its impossible to go tough)

>> Even so, it doesn't make sense to cripple the pm system just so those on the peak end of the spectrum have less pm

Well not sure i completely agree, ultimately their problem is your problem too. There is a easy solution, tough give users the choice.

True, things do look different from the other side.  And I agree, the easy solution is just to give users the choice.  That's all I was really saying in the first place: that users should have a choice.  I myself put my website address in my download post, but I'm assuming here that the average user won't stop to think that it's actually very hard to get in contact with them.  My first instinct on the website was to look at a user's profile/portfolio to find out their website or email address, which I couldn't find.  And then I had the private message fiasco.

I think that for the very popular user such as yourself, having an option to require a contact to be a friend before receiving a pm should exist.  But I think the default for that option should be off given the percentage of popular users versus unpopular, and the time it takes to become popular.  And of course what I said earlier: that you should be able to place a short message when requesting a friend.

I have a quick answer for most of your issues.  SPAM.  When we had open PM's and open emails people got thousands of spam messages because we are a high traffic site.  We battle 10,000s of spam messages to our email addresses, forums, etc.  You dont see much of that because we spend a lot of time and have a lot of technology to fight it.  But opening these things makes it much much worse for the users.

We will however take your suggestions and try what we can to make things easier.

Thanks,
Will 

Yes spam is problem. the thing i tough its not the biggest problem, the biggest is rhe notification, if you dont notify friends and handle them differently thats no issue to me.

year 2005 when my spam peaked i got about 3 mil messages of spam.