I just realized that the parent was talking about PMs, not passwords. Disregard; I cannot read, apparently.
If any of the user information was changed by an administrator the user would not get an email about it. The system does not work like that.
ETA: Moderators do not have such access.
I keep finding out about all these limitations to the Admins and Mods.
It’s almost shaking my faith. How will I keep up my awe and wonder?
You know that “Naughty/Nice” list that Santa Claus relies on? Who do you think composes it for him?
Devious. Would restoring the database from a backup return the password to the original? If so, an admin could use maintenance or other downtime to change a user’s password, read their PMs, and restore the db so the user would never know it had happened.
None of us have access to backups.
Jerry (our tech guy) could do this, I guess – he has a higher level of access than any of us – but why would he? He’s a really busy guy and has a plateful as it is without messing around with the board.
As large as this board is, anything that necessitated reinstalling a backup would take a very long time and the board would be inaccessible for days. (The last time it happened, quite a few years ago, there was no access for a week.) So that’s not likely to happen unless there’s some pressing need for it.
But it could be done.
Of course. Anyone with server access wouldn’t even have to mess around with database backups: they could just edit the includes/config.php file to grant their admin account permission to directly execute SQL queries, which they could then use to read everyone’s PMs from the AdminCP panel. So what? Pretty much everything you type into any website apart from a password or credit card information gets stored in an easily-readable format in a database somewhere that someone else is going to have access to. If you don’t trust the people who run a website with the information you type into that website, either encrypt it yourself with PGP or something or don’t type it into that website.
Well, they may not have access to passwords and private messages but there’s still the death squads.