Hi, I performed a little experiment and was quite surprised to find that an admin user could view the private discussion between two non-privileged users. I know if I really wanted, as admin of the VPS, I could see these messages in the databases (but I would never abuse that privilege without use…

[image] dnk8n: Are there options for that? Could that not be set as the default? So it turns out that a few years ago we had many long discussions about this . I was on your side, FWIW. :slight_smile: While the scenario you describe is still possible (and I don’t think there’s an audit trail)…

So its either no messages, or messages as they currently are? This feature would cause massive controversy in the community I live in!

[image] dnk8n: So its either no messages, or messages as they currently are? This is my current understanding of the situation, yes. If you want to do user-to-user messaging and you think folks are concerned about the privacy implications, then you should probably look at complementing Discou…

What you really want is https://meta.discourse.org/t/latest-on-encrypted-personal-messages/110465 . Looks like it’s not quite ready for primetime, but having PMs that cannot be read (even with access to the database) except by the intended users is on the road map.

[image] pfaffman: Looks like it’s not quite ready for primetime Thanks for sharing that! I missed the update and really good to hear it’s on the roadmap. (It’ll help solve some problems in my TODO list.)

And it’s a real solution, not a “unless the admin wants to read the PM any of several ways that cannot be detected” kind of way.

Will definitely look into implementing one of the real foolproof methods (and am going to bookmark this thread for the future because it is something I am pretty keen on learning more about). However, what would it take to simply hide the message icon from admins? I can’t have admins knowing other…

[image] dnk8n: However, what would it take to simply hide the message icon from admins? If you want to hide the message icon, you could probably do it with a theme component. If you wanted to make it a little harder to bypass, you could have a plugin do it.

[image] downey: I don’t think there’s an audit trail I believe there is if you turn on the site setting Log personal message views by Admin for other users/groups

How to make it so that admins are not able to view private messages of their users?

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) May 9, 2019, 10:33am 11

Well, sort of. Admins can still inject JS in the page that can do anything it likes with what’s displayed in the browser, including transmitting it elsewhere, etc.

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How to make it so that admins are not able to view private messages of their users?

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