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Possible Duplicates:
Any way to send a personal message to another user?
How do I contact other users?

I've asked a very difficult question about javascript on IE, and haven't been able to get any answers yet. The closest I've got is a user who mentioned that they think they remember seeing a solution somewhere, and some hints as to where to find it. Not being able to get any other help from the community, how do I go about contacting this user to try and get more details and help finding the supposed solution?

UPDATE: I've already tried adding comments, but that seems to be a rather round about way of solving the problem...

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  • @Ajan - as you've spotted, this isn't CW, it was migrated and is a later question of the one I proposed as the duplicate.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jul 17, 2010 at 20:29

3 Answers 3

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To answer your question, there isn't a way to contact other users directly unless they provide details on their profile page.

Update:

Now if you leave a comment on one of their posts the new recent changes feature should alert them by highlighting the envelope beside their username at the top of the page.

To answer the question behind your question:

If you are refering to this answer from cozmicdad.myopenid.com then they appear to be using their OpenID as their username. Going to their OpenID endpoint you can see their name is Dave Russell, althought there's no other information there (even in the vcard).

Googling for Dave Russell found lots of dave russells, but not any that I thought could be the one you're looking for. Googling for Dave Russell Programming find this: http://www.liveperson.com/dave-russell-1/. It's not 100% certain, but I'd be pretty sure that's the same person. There is a send email button on that page.

Edit: Why the downvotes? I think I've found the guy he's looking for.

(I realise it's a bit creepy, but in this day and age we should be aware that this kind of thing is possible and not really that hard (it to me longer to write this answer than to find the guy). A reminder perhaps that we need to pay attention to even the smallest pieces of information we give out about ourselves.)

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  • You solved that special problem (which is good) but not the general problem of contacting SO members. (no, I didn't downvote you)
    – VVS
    Sep 30, 2008 at 14:33
  • I think the question is a more general, can-use-on-any-member method, rather than tracking down this one guy...
    – Grundlefleck
    Sep 30, 2008 at 14:34
  • Didn't you think that perhaps that person did not wanted to be found, contacted by the other SO user, they did not provide the contact information in their profile. Sure one can be smart enough to look it up based on open id but I think it violates some privacy really.
    – kristof
    Sep 30, 2008 at 14:37
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    I only used information Dave had given about himself. He's in control of his Stackoverflow username, his OpenID endpoint, and his liveperson.com profile.
    – Sam Hasler
    Sep 30, 2008 at 14:40
  • neatly done, anyway. & it's a caution for us all :-)
    – slashmais
    Sep 30, 2008 at 15:42
  • Upvote, not for the specific work done, but for showing that it can be done and how to go about it.
    – Sundar R
    Oct 19, 2008 at 5:16
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There have been requests to add private messaging on Stack Overflow et al.

They have been declined as the intention of the site is to create a wiki rather than a social network.

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    I'm probably stepping out of line by saying this, but it's failing miserably. Too many answers and questions infused with personality. On top of which most users come here because they want to ask real people, so ultimately it ends up being a glorified forum.
    – Pharap
    Jul 10, 2013 at 7:09
  • I think SO needs to add a private contact / bump feature. It shouldn't be a social network or open to abuse, so the feature might work if you were limited to (say) 5 contacts a day or limited to fixed responses like "Please look at this question".
    – AlainD
    Jun 20, 2017 at 10:06
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If the user doesn't give a website, besides googling their nick, I think your best bet is to put a comment on one of their recent posts and hope they find it.

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