A Neat New Forum Feature!

[vibronx]

I would like to inform you all about a great feature of the new forum! If you go to your "private" messages, you are now able to see who has been eavesdropping on your conversations! If you are lucky like me, you might be able to see some enlightening results! 😍🥰

Yes, I know I already posted this on my profile feed, but I thought it was important info for everyone to have! And, sadly, not everyone will look at my profile no matter how awesome it is!

[theratypist]

Hey! I saw this on your profile feed, I tried to analyze what you meant by looking into my own inbox and didn't understand anything! I was tempted to comment on your profile feed post but thought I shouldn't bother. Now that you've officially shared it here, what does this mean? I'm not sure what I'm supposed to look at! Sorry! I'm not that quick at Where's Waldo games too. 😅

[theratypist]

P.S. I thiiiink I know what you mean because I see one convo with people who aren't supposed to be in the convo. haha. Although my other convos look normal! I still feel lost though 🤕

[vibronx]

2 minutes ago, theratypist said:

P.S. I thiiiink I know what you mean because I see one convo with people who aren't supposed to be in the convo. haha. Although my other convos look normal! I still feel lost though 🤕

Yes, exactly. You will sometimes see some people listed at the top who are not supposed to be in the convo. They are even polite enough to read any and all messages immediately after they are posted. 😇

I am being vague on purpose as to not get in trouble for negatively calling out someone. I just want people to be aware that our private conversations may not be private. I had suspicions about it before, but now there is confirmation.

[theratypist]

5 minutes ago, vibronx said:

I am being vague on purpose as to not get in trouble for negatively calling out someone.

Haha, totally understand! Hence my hesitation initially about asking about it when you initially placed it on your profile feed. Well that's disappointing, now everyone knows the last time we talked about planning to rule the world! 👀

[uk1000]

Maybe there's a list of words/groups of words that make the message/pm thread get flagged in some way for someone to check, eg. to make sure everything is okay/no rule breaking. So far I've only seen one of those pms.

[frank_d]

Hi there @vibronx

Let me try to offer some clarification as I don't see any official response being worked on.

When the new forum launched, the PM function was disabled, at least for the first 48 hours.

There was always a message saying that our inbox was full or something to that extent.

Then, yesterday, I suddenly got notifications that I had PMs.

"That's great!" I thought to myself, another feature restored.

I opened the inbox, and on the top of my inbox was a personal conversation, which without clicking on it, there was no way to tell this message wasn't for me.

So, as far as I can tell, this is pretty much what transpired:

-On the old forum, some private conversations were automatically flagged by the system for using specific sensitive keywords.

-Mods ignore those, as they are automatic, but we have no business looking into personal convos. 

-When the inbox was "restored" those messages, along with every other message ever sent to the mods and all of our personal PMs were suddenly marked as unread and sent back to us with notifications.

 

So, the entire moderation team had to -unfortunately- click on the notification only to discover it's a private conversation, we shouldn't be looking into.

Matt was notified.

They are looking into it.

 

I personally felt I had to tell my version of the story, this is not an official mods response.

[vibronx]

Thanks for the response, @frank_d. I hope it will be fixed soon.

[miiila]

Aways best to operate under the assumption that on any forum, platform or other places with pm features, conversations aren't private.

For one, forum admins need to be able to check for "illegal content", and also, you never know who else has the required eavesdrop skill points. 

It might be best to think of "pm" as personal message, in the sense of "chat with only one person, or a small, selected group, without spam comment clutter, troll posts, or whatever else you'd like to keep out of that chat,

vs.

private message in the sense of "nobody apart from the people in the pm group can read along".

(Not directed at OP but a general advice for those who blissfully live under the illusion that pm features anywhere are really private, they aren't. Often, only "bots" might listen in, like Google to your email conversations) to target you with ads, because, really, who has the time else, but still, it can and it does happen that people who have access to such features use them, be it because of legal/ToS reasons, or not.)

[mjensen415]

Thanks everyone. We're definitely aware of it. It's an artifact from the migration. Give us a few days to fix it.