Patreon Message Feedback

Is Patreon storing our message history with patrons? I know it’s not surfaced in the member management system, but I have this vague feeling that it used to be accessible somewhere.

Because of this, I’ve been assuming Patreon does still store them, and one day when the feature improves, the message history will be visible again.

I’ve just realized how breathtakingly naive this is, and maybe there’s no trove of useful CRM data about to emerge once the UI is improved.

Should I be storing my message history in my email client? I stopped doing that, but now I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.

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There definitely are times when we need to refer back to messages we’ve exchanged with patrons, and we’ve not found an easy way to do this . . .

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Same here. Historical messages are a pain to find if you have to go back even a month. Though many of us have been saying the message center needs a huge overhaul for some time. Hopefully that’s on the docket to be done because whoa. XD

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If you go to this page and scroll down, you should be able to see your entire message history with every patron.

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Now if only we could perform a search for a person to see our message history. That is much needed!

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Heck yes. Search options would be amazing.

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And threading! Sorting by most recent conversation is fine for the top level, but I want to scroll back through the whole message history with that person.

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I agree with all of these ideas! I’m sure the development team has their hands full, but an improved messaging center would be really helpful.

Brian

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Yes, I’d agree – threaded and searchable messaging is probably at the top of my list of feature requests right now. I communicate a lot with Patrons, and it’s super time consuming to scroll endlessly backwards to see what I wrote to someone several months ago.

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Well… strange and archaic to be frank. So I just got a personal message from a patron, and I respond to it, and I’m pretty sure I accidentally sent my response to 377 patrons. I had sent a private individual message to all of my patrons a few months ago, and when they responded to me, my reply to them was sent out to all 377 patrons! Instead of just the one. I think this just happened again, even though when I opened the message link from my email notification, I was taken directly to this one patron’s single message to me…

Patreon, please fix this, it is a major cause of disheartening embarrassment, thank you!!

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Thanks for the feedback @TimothyGondola. As we know that messaging needs a lot of improvement, I’ve merged your post into this new, mega thread about Messaging to make it easier for the team to find all the feedback in one place.

The main theme around the requests for messaging is for it to behave much more like an email inbox with features like:

  • Sending attachments
  • Seeing the message history between you and a patron
  • Being clear whether you’re emailing one patron, all patrons, or just patrons at a certain tier
  • The ability to get more info about the person you’re messaging (length of being a patron, total $ contributed to you, etc)
  • Working on mobile web and apps!
  • Search messages
  • Limiting ability for a patron to message a creator based on tier

We definitely know that messaging needs work. Please keep using this thread to share your thoughts on the matter and know that we’ll be reading them :slight_smile:

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Thanks Mindy.

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Please Update Messaging!

I really wish when I went to message a patron it showed me the message history between them and me! I would love to be able to scroll up to see our first messages and everything in between - I think this would make a huge difference to the ease of use on this platform.

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the messaging function of Patreon is clunky at best, the lack of a search function makes it impossible to really work with and takes way too much of my time trying to find things. Please please get this done

A post was merged into an existing topic: Sales Tax AMA with Jack Conte

Pretty please: revamp the messages system so that all messages exchanged with one patron are all in the same place. So basically make it work like Whatsapp/Facebook messenger/any other messaging tool out there in which you can look for a person’s name and see the whole message history.

This would give much needed perspective in previous exchanges with a patron.

I can’t imagine this being asked before, so if it has already been asked and I can vote for it just point me at the right post :slight_smile:

Marcela

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1000 times this, yes please.

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100%. If Patreon is a member management tool, there’s a huge gap in terms of CRM. I want to be able to see my interactions with a member all in one place. Right now it’s like a hallucinatory dream, entering every conversation with total amnesia. I have ~500 patrons, and I can’t keep my kids’ names straight.

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It’s been months… and the messaging function has not changed a bit when clearly many need this to change. I’m surely not the only one who absolutely hates the message function in Patreon and how it’s utterly impossible to work with it. There’s no search option, instead one has to scroll through all the old messages to patrons. There’s no way to delete any of the old messages, in short, this whole thing is impossible to work with and I’ve spent way too much of my time trying to find an older message resulting in sending another message to my patron. I would like to be able to archive some messages and delete others. Heck, to even store them in folders related to their tiers. Making things easier to find and keeping track of everything. Send attachments, like their downloadable rewards etc. Now I have to do that all outside of Patreon or in a post, which so many miss.
Please, if anything, update this bloody function

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I really don’t want to just be a downer here, but honestly this topic has been open for so long and shown such a complete lack of progress that I don’t think we are going to see a satisfactory solution…

In my opinion, the two realistic options are:

  1. Patreon acquires an external soluiion. (Better option.)
  2. We, as creators, develop / acquire our own workaround(s). (Less optimal.)
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