messages vanishing bug

If a user hasn’t actually sent a message and hasn’t actually done any changes to their preferences, when they send their first message, the database field spm_message_inbox_keep will be empty. Because of this, and unless the user PHYSICALLY changes their preferences in the ‘personalize messages’ page then after a short time their messages will vanish.

The plugin author needs to change this so that the DEFAULT on the FIRST message send and hence the entry in the usermeta table is set to:

Meta_key = spm_message_inbox_keep
meta_value = keep

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/simple-personal-message/

For now, I have hacked line 1497 (approx) in admin/class-simple-personal-message-admin.php thus:

// if ($inbox->meta_value != 'keep') {
            if ($inbox->meta_value == '') {

So now nothing will auto empty and the user won’t start losing messages.

Further; The choices in personalize messages should be set thus:

Keep forever (default) with the default in the database set as an empty field
Keep for 30 days
keep for 60 days
etc…
Don’t keep (which they have to select)

this will save the frustration for users of seeing their messages vanish before they realize they have to actually manually save the prefs before they send their first message. This is not good practice.

So.
The bug that needs to be fixed is to make sure the DEFAULT before ANY messages are sent (or upon first message sent) is NOT empty.

thanks