Private Messages Lite sends short messages that delete themselves. Here is what everything
on the page does.
Sending a message
Fill in your name, who it is for, and the message, then press
Send.
Names need at least three letters or numbers, and nothing else.
The first time you write to somebody, an Invite window appears with a link.
Copy it and send it to them however you normally would — text, email, anything.
The link does not contain your message. It only tells their page who is
writing, so they can open it and read what you sent.
A link works once. Whoever opens it first takes it up, and after that it
opens nothing — so a link that gets forwarded, or left sitting in a chat, is no use
to anybody who finds it later.
After that first time, messages to the same person just send. No more links.
If you type a name close to one you have used before, the page asks whether you meant
the old one — so a typo does not quietly start a second conversation.
Receiving a message
Opening someone's link puts you on the same page they used, set up to reply: their
name is already in the box, and what they wrote sits above it.
If you cannot open the link — or it arrived broken — use the invite code
instead. It is the ten characters at the end of every invite link, and every invite
now carries it as a line of its own.
Press the Enter Invite Code button under the form,
then Paste. Whatever you copied is searched for a code, so
copying the whole invite message works just as well as picking the ten
characters out by hand — there is nothing to aim at. You can also type it. The same
button is on the settings page.
New messages arrive on their own. The page checks every few seconds — you do not need
to refresh.
A short sound plays when something arrives — unless you have touched the page
in the last 45 seconds, in which case you are already looking at it and do not
need telling.
The speaker button in the side menu turns the sound off and on - open the menu
with the arrow on the left edge of a phone, or the menu button at the top left on a
computer. It gains a line through it and says "Sound off" when the sound is off. Your
choice is remembered. You can also play it on
purpose, to find out whether this device will make it, under
Arrival sound in the settings.
Your phone will not play the sound if it is locked, if the page is in the background,
or — on an iPhone — if the silent switch is on.
For those cases there is
Tell me when a message arrives: the device itself is
told, so a message reaches you with the app closed or the phone in your pocket. The
notification says only that something is waiting — never a name, a sender, or any of
the message. On an iPhone it works from the home-screen copy of the app, not from a
Safari tab.
Checking a link before you open it
Our links all begin https://pmsgslite.com/?m= followed by ten characters. A
forged one cannot use that address, so it uses one that looks like it — a 1 in
place of the l, a longer name that only starts with ours, or a letter from
another alphabet that draws the same shape.
None of those are fair to expect anyone to spot in a chat window. Paste the link
into Check a link instead and it will tell you whose address
it really is. The check happens in your browser; the link is not sent anywhere.
If you are checking a link you are suspicious of, reach that page by typing
pmsgslite.com/verifylink yourself rather than by following a link in the
message — a checker you were sent can be forged along with it.
Messages delete themselves
Every message disappears 35 seconds after it was sent. The countdown is shown
beside it.
Three buttons buy more time: adds a second, adds a minute, and
adds six minutes. However often you press them, the longest a message can
have left is 59 minutes and 59 seconds.
freezes a message: it adds 24 hours to the countdown and a note pops up
to say so. The snowflake fades while the freeze is on. Press it again to cancel the
freeze - the countdown then starts again from 35 seconds. A message can be frozen
up to 11 times, and while it is frozen the three buttons above can still add to it.
Extending works for both of you — the other person's page sees the new time
too.
Delete in the history removes a message straight away
instead of waiting. It asks you to confirm first.
Either of you can delete a message. Once the text is gone it is gone, for both
sides.
Messages go on time whether or not anybody is looking. Nobody has to have the
conversation open for the text to be deleted — the server sees to it.
The two lists
Latest Messages — the recent conversation in plain text, yours marked
→ and theirs ←, with the countdown and the time buttons.
Message History — everything you have sent and received with that person.
Tap the message column to read one, and tap it again to put it back behind the
scrambled version.
The history shows when each message was sent, how long it has left, and a button to
delete it now.
Hide folds the history away. On a phone it starts folded,
since there is not room for everything at once.
Languages
The flag under the title sets the language you read in. Tap the flag or the
… beside it to see all of them.
The second flag, next to the message box, sets the language you are writing
for — the one your receiver will read it in.
Messages you receive are translated into your language, with the original shown
underneath so you can always see what was actually written.
Translation happens on your own device. Your messages are never sent to a
translation service.
Not every browser can do this yet. Where it cannot, messages simply appear as they
were written.
If you open somebody's invite link, the page greets you in the language they chose
for you — until you pick your own, which then sticks.
Photos
Photo attaches a picture to a message. It disappears on the
same countdown as the words.
A photo can be sent on its own, with no message.
If there is a face in it, a Hair colour row appears and you can recolour the
hair — black, brown, auburn, blonde, red, pink, blue, green, purple or grey.
Each colour is applied to the original photo, so you can try them one after another
without the picture drifting.
Settings, and how to reach them
The gear opens them. It sits on the full header — the tall one, with
the title and the flag. The home icon moves between the three headers: the
full one, the compact one, and the single line. In the two short ones there is no
gear, so either tap the home icon until the full header is back, or use the links
below.
Everything there belongs to the browser you are reading this in. There is no
account, so nothing follows you to another device, and a shortcut on your home
screen normally keeps its own.
Open an invite with its code — the same
button as on the front page, kept here so it can be found again. Every invite link
ends in ten characters, and those ten characters will open it on their own: press
the button, then Paste. Use it when a link will not open, when it arrived
broken, or on an iPhone where the app lives on the home screen — tapping a link
there opens Safari instead, and Safari keeps its own separate conversations and
gets no notifications.
Keep the top of the page in view — whether the
header stays put while the conversation scrolls under it. One switch for each of the
three headers: Home 1 the full one, Home 2 the compact one,
Home 3 the single line.
Putting it on your phone
You can add pMsgsLite to your home screen, so it opens with one tap, full screen,
with no address bar. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is installed from a store: it
is a shortcut to this same site, asking for no permissions and creating no
account.
The steps for iPhone and for Android, and a button that does it where your browser
allows, are on the settings page.
Receiving on an iPhone home-screen app: tapping an invite link opens Safari,
not the app, and the app keeps its own separate conversations — so a link followed
that way arrives in Safari instead. To receive inside the app, open it from its icon
and use Enter Invite Code on the front page. Android has no such problem:
the Play Store app opens invite links itself.
Your session
Your name is remembered for 48 hours, so you come back to the same
conversations without typing it again.
If nothing at all happens for 48 hours — nothing sent, nothing received, nobody
touching the page — the session ends itself.
End Session at the top right leaves that name behind
completely: every message you sent is deleted, the page forgets you, and you
start again as a stranger.
That cannot be undone, and it is not limited to the device you are on.
Messages sent to you are not deleted by this — those belong to the other side
of the conversation.
Worth knowing
Your name is not what identifies you — this browser is. Two people using the same
name never see each other's messages.
Which also means your conversations live in this browser. Clearing your
cookies, or opening the app on another device, starts you as somebody new with an
empty history, and there is no way back to the old one.
An invite link is good for one opening. Send it to the person you meant, and if
it gets opened by mistake you will need to send a fresh one.
Once you have opened somebody's link you do not need it again — going to the site
normally shows the conversation. Opening the link a second time will say it is
invalid, and that is expected.
35 seconds is short. Somebody who opens their link a minute late will find the
message already gone.
Messages are stored scrambled and are only unscrambled to show them to you.
Nothing here needs an account, a password, or an email address.