As I’ve said before, I believe people have been warned for it in the past, so there’s an understanding it’s against the rules. I can’t remember any such warnings myself because I can’t remember the last time it even came up. And on top of that, we prefer not to warn people in private. It’s happened a few times, but we try not to do that. If a poster has an issue with a warning I’d rather the warning itself be public so the poster not feel pressured to keep it quiet.
As a mod stating my opinion rather than speaking for the group, I think it makes sense for us to act if private messaging rises to the level of harrassment, but we’re not in the business of policing everybody’s private conversations. We can’t read them and I don’t think we want to go there because of the privacy issue and the time involved. And as I see it, the main reason we police insults is that they detract from threads, which is not the case with a private message even if it’s insulting.
If someone is harrassing you by private message, I’d say the recourse is to tell the mods and not to post it publicly. And I think the idea that if you are rude, you lose the expectation of privacy is ridiculous. The idea that TubaDiva was near or over such a line and had no expectation of privacy I can only say is bullshit. Seven asked her a question in private and she had no reason to expect her answer would be made public.
I’ve said this several times, but the issue with Seven as far as I was concerned is not that he quoted someone’s private message or a PM from an administrator, it’s that the comment he quoted was a clear signal he was trolling. But as the guy who wrote up the banning announcement I never tried to hang it on the fact that it was from a PM. If his sig had said “I am here only to snark, troll and annoy” or whatever, that would have earned much the same response since I think the message would have been the same. Since this is a controversial point on its own perhaps we should leave it for another thread.