Let me set the scene. I'm a Project Coordinator for the Netherlands project, and currently that has 23272 profiles on the Watchlist (yes, too many, and we are slowly reducing that).
On a reasonably frequent basis someone will send a genealogical query question as a private message, as I can't research everything, I then usually advice them to post it as a comment on the profile and or a G2G post.
I think the send private message is more obvious as it occurs near the top of the page, where as the Post New Comment is near the bottom, so people tend to click private message when it should be a comment on the profile.
Would it be possible to add a link next the send private message, that has leave a comment, that will scroll down to that section, to reduce the number of private messages that should be comments?
A bit more work, but even better would be a single "leave a message" link and the next page giving the option, and some advice of when to use which, of either private message or public comment.
