[charmedhour]

You're absolutely right about the resentment garnered by forced read receipts, Videx, so I hesitate to take such a measure.

However, phpBB does not use "read receipts" - the user does not have the ability to hide whether or not they have read the message. You can tell simply by whether it's moved from the outbox to the sent box.

You'd think this would also garner resentment but actually, it never did. I think it's something psychologically about having that "sender has requested read receipt" box pop up in your face and thinking "Why does this person want to get in my business?" that causes a negative reaction. Since phpBB doesn't have that - it's ALWAYS marked as read - people just accept it. In fact, as senders, they like it. "Why hasn't Leslie replied? Oh, she hasn't read it yet" (or vice versa). And the editable feature... "CRAP I shouldn't have said that! Did it in the heat of the moment... Better fix it before it's read!" lol

A pity vBulletin doesn't seem to have this feature or even a hack for it. Surprising, since there are a myriad of other useful hacks, that this has been overlooked. It was quite popular among my users, and I also appreciated it personally. Perhaps one day, some clever coder will do it for vBulletin as well.

Right now, I'll just tell my users that no software is perfect. They are pleased with vBulletin overall, but it's natural that not EVERYTHING will be better.

Thanks for the replies.