Lender Messages

[Guest]

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[flann]

Friends,

I usually hide behind Roma for posts like this, but she went home sick.  Me, I've been pretty sidelined lately as well.  I hurt my hamstring playing hoops in the ghetto and have had trouble moving around.  So, I was a dork last weekend and stayed home and coded up a new feature..."Lender Messages".

For a long while I've received feedback that it would be nice to actually be able to meet people on our site instead of just browsing lender pages.  So I made a feature that lets one lender write a message to another on the site.  It's basically Kiva's version of a "Private Messages".  I've limited it to logged in users who are public and have actually made loans.  A Lender can send messages from another's Lender Page.  Lenders can check their messages in "My Portfolio".  Lenders can turn off the emails associated with such messages from a new "Email Preferences" screen.

I made a very basic version of this feature and I wanted to get peoples' feedback before we took it much farther.  It's going out on the live site tomorrow and am open to feedback over the next few days.  You can tell me what you would change about it, or just tell me you love it.   I'm even open to canning the feature if it sucks.   

Matt