PL8Box? I don't need no stinking PL8Box...

Hi Folks,

Now that I got some of the safety issues out of the way I thought I'd talk about one of the great features of PL8SCAN. For those of you familiar with how an online dating service works our PL8Box feature should be obvious.

It was simple to allow people to Post messages to a license plate and then let anyone get them but we wondered - what if the person wanted a reply to their message? How could we do that but still protect everyone's privacy. Once you work though it the answer seems obvious but believe me we struggled with it because we wanted to make sure our users felt comfortable that we had protected their privacy.

So it goes like this - every registered member of PL8SCAN gets a PL8Box. It functions pretty much like an email inbox. If you (a member) Post a message at PL8SCAN you can choose to make it anonymous or to attach your username to it. If it's anonymous then of course no one will ever know who wrote it. If you attach your username to it two things can happen. First of all another member can lookup your profile. We covered that earlier in this blog but basically that means that they can see only the information in your profile that YOU allow them to see (and that can NEVER include personal information like phone numbers or addresses). Secondly - and most importantly - they now have a way to reply to your message. With a click on the Reply button for your message a message composition window comes up. The window is pre-addressed to the username of the original message sender (you) and includes a copy of your message. They type in their message and click Submit and voila! - it shows up only in your PL8Box with their username attached to it. From that point on the two of you can communicate within the PL8SCAN site.

I hope I've explained this well. Let me know if not. See you on the road...