Chat and safety
When a chat opens, what you may write in it, and what changes once a booking is confirmed.
In this topic
When a chat opens
A chat opens around a listing. The renter opens it from the listing page, and the host receives the thread.
A thread can be opened only on a published listing, and you have to be signed in. You cannot open a thread on your own listing.
There is one thread per listing and renter. Pressing the message button again brings you back to the same thread with all of its history.
The chat rules a host accepts
A host accepts the chat rules once, before the first message they send. Without that acceptance the server will not send the message.
A renter is never asked to accept anything. A first question about a space does not need a consent screen in front of it.
The acceptance is kept against your account, not against a thread. You accept once and you are not asked again in later threads.
Contact details are blocked
Until there is a confirmed booking, the chat does not carry contact details. Phone numbers, email addresses and links are refused.
The check runs on the server, not on your device. A message that is caught is not sent at all, and the other side does not see it.
There is no warning first. Either the message goes through or it is refused, and there is no step in between.
Workarounds do not help. A number written out in words, in another set of digits, or with invisible characters between the digits is still read as a number.
Why keep the arrangement here
The block is not there to make things hard for you. It protects what stays on the record.
An arrangement made off Peelpel is not a booking. No period is held, nothing records what was agreed, and there is nobody to turn to if the space is not free when you arrive.
The host loses too. An arrangement made by phone leaves no record of what was promised and no way to show that the space was really booked.
Keep the arrangement here until the booking is confirmed. After that you can pass on any detail you need.
What changes once there is a booking
The moment a booking closes on the listing, the restriction on contact details in that conversation is lifted.
Both sides can then send a phone number, a link or whatever the arrangement needs. There is nothing left to withhold: the details have opened anyway.
Along with it, the street, the house number, the internal location and the other party's phone number are released.
A conversation without a booking stays restricted, even if you wrote in it that you had agreed. What lifts the restriction is a booking, not agreement in text.
Removing a thread from your inbox
You can remove a thread from your inbox. The removal applies to you alone, and the other side sees nothing change.
The messages themselves stay. A thread is not deleted, because it has two sides and one record.
If the other side writes again, the thread comes back to your inbox with the new message. There is nothing to undo.
You can also reach it again from the listing page, and get the same thread with its history.