Just how private are the private messages that are sent between posters? I’ve often wondered this.
I post mainly on soap opera message boards (please don’t judge), and you would not believe how low down and nasty some of these women get. The fights and wars over fictional characters are brutal.
Anyone know the answer?
We can’t read them here. That may not be the case on other boards with different software and (I think) other posters say you can hack vBulletin software to let moderators or admins do that, but we haven’t done that here either. If you are being harassed or having some other problem over private messages, you can forward or email them to the mods.
Who do you think they are, the NSA?
I don’t know about SDMB, but on some boards admins can read PMs but only if the recipient reports them.
As The Great Banninator said, no, we can’t do that on this board.
We can’t see your password, either. We used to be able to do that in either an earlier edition of vBulletin, or in the BB system that we used before vBulletin.
Thank you, that’s kind of what I figured. No, I’m not having any problems, I just wanted to know if a Mod would know if I said something about them in a private message to another poster.
I wouldn’t want to be snooped on.
The thought-reading upgrade is still in beta, so no, no snooping.
Well, you WERE flying under the radar. Now, though, you’ve painted a big bullseye on yourself. 
Just kidding. You can talk trash about mods in PMs all you want, and we won’t know.
I’m a mod on another board and the mods there and as Marley said here will only see private messages if a member reports the message to them
Admins do have the power to change passwords for any account. This is, of course, for a good reason which is to help a user who has forgotten their password. The user can then immediately change the new password to something else.
A rogue Admin could change the password of a user account and then read all of the PMs. Obviously, the user would realize that something might be up when their password no longer worked so it isn’t exactly the most clever of tricks.
Aside from that, without a hack, there isn’t a way for an Admin to read private messages.
I’m pretty sure that resetting a password would send an email notification to the user. I’m not sure, though.
Anyone want to volunteer for an admin to change their password so we can find out?
::Hands LynnBodoni a fiver.::
Oh crap. I see another April Fool’s Day prank coming.
I just tried it with a fake account on a board where I am an Admin and I didn’t get an email.
BTW, Admins can also change the email address on an account which would circumvent that anyway.
I’m sure you were gushing praise for a mod and didn’t want to be embarrassed. 
[johnnycarson]I did not know that.[/johnnycarson]
I never even thought of it before now. Wow.
No, we can’t read your PMs unless you forward them to us.
Since we also cannot view passwords we have no idea what your password might be, so if we messed with it you’d know pretty quickly.
What does provoke the system into sending an email to the email address of a user is an attempt to sign in to the board that does not work – after five attempts the system locks up access to that account and sends an email to the authorized user asking if they attempted to sign in.
Unless the board is running an add-on to encrypt the PMs in the database (I’m guessing it isn’t, as I believe the SDMB is a fairly vanilla configuration of vB), they could be retrieved by a sufficiently privileged DBA.
That’s not the same thing as them being casually readable by a board administrator though, of course.
I volunteer. Go ahead.
No. But thank you.
Your privacy is important to us. We have no need to be reading your private messages, not even with your consent.
That basic trust is meaningful. If you think we’re snooping on you, that’s no trust at all.
Huh? He wasn’t asking for you to read his PMs. He was asking for you, per Lynn’s offer, to change his password and see if he got an email notification.
Does vBulletin really store passwords in cleartext?