I don’t send PMs very often, and i don’t receive many either.
In the cases where i’ve received them, it has always been because the person just wanted to have a private chat or make a comment about something without placing it in a thread. In every case, there has been no need, and no reason, for me to make the content of those PMs public. And if i have a friendly PM conversation with someone, i would always ask their permission before revealing anything they said in PMs, and if they refused i would respect their wishes.
BUT…
If someone sent me an abusive PM for no reason other than to throw invective at me or criticize me away from the eyes of other SDMB members, i would feel no compunction about sharing it, if i thought it would be at all productive or interesting to do so.
Yes, the expectation of privacy in a private communication is a matter of etiquette. But so is not being an asshole. And if someone is an asshole to me in a PM, i do not feel etiquette-bound to respect the privacy of the communication.
This is unlikely ever to be an issue, but that’s my feelings on the matter.
I think that it’s courteous to get someone’s permission before posting a private message they sent you. If that person’s PM to you was unsolicited and/or rude, I don’t think they are owed that courtesy. A good person would still take the higher ground, but I won’t judge anyone too harshly who chooses not to.
There should not be a rule forbidding the posting of private messages, IMO.
If there HAD been a rule about not posting PMs, I would be arguing that in this case, many of the very good reasons for supporting such a rule - expectations of privacy, etiquette breach etc should be exempted because of revealing more worrying lapses. Bit like Whistleblowing, really.
For example, the question of in essence breaking the terms of a confidential discussion. If for example, I’d PM’d a mod about a contentious issue on the board and I’d been given so much as a boilerplate “we’re all discussing that in private, we’re going to give an update later”, not only would I thikn it wrong to quote that, I think it was questionable to even paraphrase the contents (by the way an interesting side issue). Why? well, if nothing else, the information does not just relate to me, it pertains to other posters and administrators of the board.
However, I am in the body of opinion that being sent an insulting PM does NOT and should not be held to this standard. For one thing, no board activity is being discussed here, the only information being published is about Seven himself. FWIW, it’s my opinion that the response was given in the PM only because it was believed it would remain secret. I think it indeed like whispering something nasty in someone’s ear and then being angry when it gets told to everyone what you just said.
Here’s what I think. Irrespective of privacy theory or sdmb rules, our PMs and emails have been posted elsewhere and will continue to be. I’ve assumed for as long as I can remember that someone would eventually post one of my emails and PMs on one of the other boards (even before the newest batch). In at least one case, someone did. I wasn’t upset; I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of (other than a few typos). But hey, I never consented to that, and my email was not abusive. Of course, when that guy then emailed me, he was shocked–shocked I say–to find that I didn’t respond. :eek: I’ve got a bunch of emails from the guy. I may post them in MPSIMS later. They’re pretty funny, in a stalkerish sort of way. They’d also doubly qualify under Giraffe’s more limited rule of etiquette–they were unsolicited and rude. So I guess I should have had no compunction about starting that MPSIMS thread a lot sooner.
In other words, **Johnny’s **right–If I don’t want my stuff published, my option is not to respond. No matter what I write, it can be posted elsewhere without my consent. That’s already how it is, no matter what rule we make here.
So I guess, if I the decision was mine alone, I’d say let’s make the rule that PMs and emails are not considered private and may be posted by mods and posters alike.
I’d trust you and lots of other posters to make a determination like this objectively. In fact, I’d be stunned to see you invoke such a rule in bad faith. But then there are other posters from whom I’d expect . . . less.
If it’s true, then perhaps the whole thing should just fall under the “Don’t be a jerk” rule, to be decided on a case-by-case basis. The question then might be whether the sender of the PM was a big enough jerk that their jerkitude deserved to be put on display for all to see. Or, on the other hand, whether the original PM was perfectly OK, and the person who revealed it was being a jerk.
IF zombie aliens from space are attacking with 1920’s style death rays, then…:rolleyes::rolleyes:
Oh come on, you know he tried to pull that off as a “let’s slip it in and see if anyone notices” BS.:dubious:
Damn it, we can’t be sure she sent anything like that at all, and we certainly dont know the context, so it’s super-bullshit-ariffic to move to “on a regular basis”.
I agree with this with one exception: I think that if regular posters are PMing mods or admins about board stuff, they should have an expectation that the mods or admins aren’t going to turn around and make their messages public. A private message between two posters is one thing – the onus is on me to only send messages to people who I trust not to repeat them, or say things I don’t mind having repeated. But if I’m communicating about board stuff with a mod, it’s not because I have chosen to trust them, it’s because they’re who I have to discuss board stuff with. As an example, if you posted something embarrassing and PM’d a mod to beg them to make it disappear (they’d generally refuse, naturally, but that doesn’t necessarily stop you from asking), you should have an expectation that they don’t make your request public, as it might further embarrass you.
I guess what I’m getting at is that if the information is something they only have access to because they’re a mod/admin, then they shouldn’t be disclosing it. Personally, I think this privileged information oughta include stuff like how often people report posts, or whether or not they make a lot of questionable post reports, but I think there was a recent episode where a mod disclosed that type of information in order to mock someone.
I think that is the rule–In other words, there isn’t a specific rule for this, but it’s possible to be a jerk even though you’ve broken no specific rule. Folks seem to be asking for something more black and white because they don’t want to have to guess about what jerky conduct is and risk sanction if they guess wrong. I can understand that desire. If it were you and me here alone, I think we’d do fine with the jerk rule and probably not even need that (and of course it’d be sort of silly for us to PM each other if it was just us, but you get the picture). Because it’s you and me and lots of other people, some of whom have different ideas about what counts as abusive, jerky, unprofessional, and rude, a bright-line rule might well be more efficient. Maybe that’d be worse, I dunno. At any rate, I need to get up for work in four hours, so I’d better go to sleep.
I get plenty of abusive thread reports and PMs. I’m required to read them. If I wrote a warning for the offender, I’d expect a thread to appear asking what basis I had for the warning. Similarly, if I ignored the message, the sender would probably start a thread complaining that their message had been ignored. And I guess I’d be stuck with the bit from Police Academy:
I find that unacceptable. But according to your rule, I wouldn’t be able to disclose:
The source of the PMs;
Their frequency; or
Their contents.
So unless I’m missing something, I’m stuck with the Police Academy bit. Maybe I’m missing something.
There was a thread in which someone (a young woman?), whose name started with a V, had her feelings hurt by her minister who was very judgmental about something that she had done. He sent her an email and she brought it to the Straight Dope for discussion. She was very upset and posted his email, I think. The minister may have posted here also. I’m not certain.
The Doper ended up being banned over it and other Dopers advised not to post from outside mail. I don’t know if this was to include PM or not.
Sorry that I can’t provide a link. I can barely remember the situation.
Someone pushed the limits of abuse with me last year in PM at Thanksgiving and then told me not to bother to respond because she wouldn’t be available. I responded anyway, but made an effort to be pleasant. That was insufficient and so I got more abuse.
If that happens again, I’m just going to send it to an Administrator. (I’ll wait until after the holidays!) As long as PM is sponsored by SDMB, I think they should be aware of who is abusing the privilege.
Some people are just not happy unless they are hounding others and stirring up trouble.
It’s been said that the mods don’t/can’t read PMs. But I just want to be sure of something. Does this mean that if a poster were to complain about an abusive PM and the accused denied it, or insisted it was out of context, the mods would have no way of knowing what really happened?
If that’s the case, then that alone is a reason not to allow PMs to be posted on the board without the sender’s permission. The mods simply don’t have the power to preform their function in that case. Allowing disputes in PMs (the only case where a PM would be posted against the wishes of the sender) to spill out into the rest of the board, would put them in an impossible position.
Communications with my clients are confidential for me. Any other communications with me are not confidential. Unless you are my client, expect that whatever you communicate with me could be disclosed by me at my discretion, and govern yourself accordingly. Whether or not you are message board moderator is irrelevant to my discretion.
Include me in the “don’t want it shared? don’t write it.” group.
A perfect example is the e-mail that Boston police officer Justin Barrett wrote using racial epithets (story here). Are the recipients of that e-mail wrong to have shared it?
Maybe I haven’t seen how this sort of thing goes down, but I’d expect you to issue a warning in private for abuse in a private message. And if the warning led to a suspension or banning, anyone asking what the poster was warned for should just be told “abuse of board staff in private messages.” If people demand to know exactly what the abuse was, tell them board staff doesn’t disclose the content of private messages sent to them by members. I don’t really see what’s so complicated about it.
Are you saying that if someone sends you an abusive PM, you’ll warn them and post their PM to a thread to announce the warning? That seems strange.
I believe he said that if he gave someone a warning for the contents of a private message, he expects the poster would start a thread to complain about the warning. But if all PMs to staff are private, Gfactor couldn’t say what it was that drew the warning.
I’ve asked other mods to weigh in here, but I’ll say now that a one-way confidentiality concept is not going to fly. Communications with mods and admins, including warnings, are considered private. If you want to be able to post anything we say to you, you’ll have to make the same sacrifice. We are not public officials. And even if most posters actually would be willing to have the staff post the PMs they receive, I don’t think I’d want to go there anyway: it’s unnecessary and stupid, and would only lead to abuse and make everybody’s lives more difficult.
No, you’re not public officials. You’re (in theory) professionals dealing with customers and hopefully respecting their privacy. Here’s the way it works in the real world: companies are expected to respect their customers’ privacy, and yet customers are not expected to respect the company’s privacy. They enthusiastically share information about their experiences. If a company expects something to be private, you keep it private by not saying it to someone outside the company. This is one of the reasons that customer-facing employees are frequently held to standards of professionalism: you say something unprofessional or rude to a customer and you can pretty much expect that other customers are going to hear about it.
And we do respect their privacy, although I point out that we’re volunteers and we are fellow posters. Things being what they are we know messages from us are not really private: everybody knows people post our PMs on other sites, while we can’t and won’t do the same here. I don’t think we have to allow people an unrestricted right to post our messages while offering ourselves no defense. Taking criticism for warning and bans is part of the job. “You have to respect our privacy while we can ignore yours whenever you say something we deem relevant to other posters” is simply an unnecessary constraint. It’s about as vague as the proposal that PMs are private unless they are somehow nasty: it turns the whole concept to jelly.
