I use PMs constantly given my role here at BPL. I know people are getting them because they are responding to me and I am responding to them.
My sense is that the most likely reason people are not responding is that their email notifications for PMs are going into their spam folders.
I also know that email notifications for GS posts are working, as recently as last week when people responded to a post I made and then responded to my responses.
you can’t directly reply to a PM you’ve received. You have to instead go to the member’s profile and send a PM to them to get through.
I do not think this is correct unless you mean that people cannot respond by replying to a notification email. Again, I respond to PMs very frequently and I get responses to those PMs. I get to their PMs by clicking the emailed links when I’m on my phone or my own laptop but I also get to them by going to my PMs on the website and hitting the reply button on PMs when I’m on my work computer at lunch (which doesn’t have my personal email account on it so I have to manually respond). I don’t ever go to people’s profiles when responding.