reading pm

A few weeks ago I stopped colaborating in a forum. And I don´t know why but I think (alright me and a couple of friends) that someone from the administration was able to read the private messages of the users.

If there is a way, I do not want to know how to do. I find it is a direct attempt against the privacy of the users, and definitively against any ethical standarts.

But I am really curious about it. Can the administrator team have access to that information?

Thanks a lot :wave:

the pm's are stored in the database.. If they know how to get to them in the database, then yes, they can read your pm's.

Additionally, there are a couple of mods at vBulletin.org that will allow administrators to read their members' pm's.

Personally, I feel that there are very very few situations where this is acceptable policy. It's been done to me, and I didn't like it at all.

I could understand that perhaps if a user harass another user, could be that those pms can be helpfull to prove the harassment.
But I cannot imaging another reason. The thing was that the forum I talking about was like a concentration camp. Better to forgot that time :tongue:

It can be done with this (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=123166&highlight=read+private+message)

I liked the way the PM workbench (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=95698&highlight=pm+workbench) handled this, it had an user agreement stating that the admin(s) could read the pm's only if the message was reported, and it send a message to the user if the pm in question was being read by the admin. Or at least that's what I understood about how it worked, I've never been in that situation myself.