State of the Board

And let me rephrase what I said earlier, the only reason I think we should spin it a different way is because of the over reaction that will occur. I have no problem with you guys having that ability, I don't need to see the PM's either because I trust Eric and Frank's decisions, not that any of you are saying that. But, I rather like not knowing what was exactly said so I can deflect people when they come asking.

 
Yeah, it's really about the members knowing that that ability is there and that the admin team reserves the right to use it if necessary. Like knapplc said, I trust Eric's and AR's decision making and I have no doubt that their use of this was only in the best interest of the board. We're all rational here and I don't think anyone is chomping at the bit to read through PMs but we need to make sure that the community at large understands that this is not something that will be abused or used against them with regularity. It sounds like you guys have come to a point where that will be stressed in the revision and hopefully it will satiate the board on the whole.

 
I would prefer not to read the PMs. But their contents are going to be the focus of the members' ire, and the more we know, generally, the better. That's why I asked.

The questions I've asked are what the members are going to ask. Make no mistake, their takeaway from whatever we post is going to be "The HuskerBoard Mods are reading our PMs." It doesn't matter if that's true, that's what they're going to hear, and they'll focus on that.

It's best to prepare for that response. If it doesn't happen, that's great. If it does, we're ready.

 
Junior asked me this:

So are private messages actually private or are you guys reading them too?
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I explained to him that I do not read anyone's PMs but the site is ultimately responsible for illegal activity and such that may go on in there, and in certain circumstances site administrators may be obligated to. And I asked him where it's coming from.

Where is it coming from, I wonder?

 
Good. Thanks, Alex.

Also, guys, if any of you get a similar inquiry, you can, if you wish, respond similarly to Alex, or tell them to contact me. And you can tell them that this issue will be addressed very soon in the statement Eric will be posting.

 
Frank, it could be because the Log In feature isn't designed for something like reading PMs -- it's just kind of a poor implementation on IPB's part that actually gives the admin total access like that. I think it's intended to be more for debugging, i.e, how that member sees the board with their various permissions masks and overrides and saved settings, etc.

So, when you are reading PMs, you could be updating "last read" timestamps.

And I noticed you can't log in as banned users -- and this is starting to make sense why people have said on two occasions since his actual banning that tschu wasn't banned. It wouldn't surprise me if people have figured it out.

 
Well, as to tschu, that's easy to understand. When he was banned, his status was not changed from Members to Banned. When I read the posts about his status still showing Member, I went in and changed to Banned. That's why people would go to his profile but it wouldn't display, but at the same time it showed Member under his avatar.

And I'm not so sure that the Log In button was intended just to debug. I can see it as easier for the programmers to do that than to create explicit functions in the CP for accessing any information concerning that member. Besides, even when used to debug, if the member's problem is the PM system it still means that the intent is to allow us to read the PMs even if for no other reason than to fix whatever issue exists for that member. Put another way, The programmers know that if something goes through the board, it's i. The database and therefore accessible. Just a question as to how easy it is to access it - write a SQL script or hit the log in button.

I guess what I'm saying is that I know of no evidence that points to the intent the programmers had for the feature.

 
Ah. Well, what I was getting at there is I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have it built in to not update timestamps. So when PMs are read, it can be figured out if someone else is seeing the timestamp updated.

Or like Dave said, they're deducing it otherwise somehow.

 
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The timestamp would update when the actual user reads the PM. Say Frank logged in as me & read my PMs. When I go into my PM as me, it'll show the current time, not the time Frank read it.

The only way they'd know someone had read their PM via timestamp is if they looked at their message list. They would also have to know when they last looked at the message. They could tell if they hadn't viewed their messages for days, and a recent last-viewed stamp was on one of them, but I doubt many people know when they looked at any specific one of their messages with much accuracy. Especially if they didn't know they should look for that.

 
If Member B hasn't been banned, but Member A was banned yesterday, and Member B checks their PM conversation and sees that Member A last read the PM again this morning...that's what I was thinking of. It only needed to happen for one of the members involved to then spread.

It does seem like a long shot, just offering possible explanations, since they weren't informed by us.

 
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