I really liked the idea of private templates and the mechanics you proposed (PM to yourself + tag) and I think it would be a great functionality to add in the plugin. I’m not that sure however about two+users be able to share this templates using PMs.
Let me explain why:
Currently, you can only select a parent category to store templates but you can have sub-categories with different permissions to address multiple groups seeing different sets of templates. This use case should be covered.
In addition to that, I plan to add to capability to have multiple parent categories to allow better template organization and easier security definition.
The problem arises when you add PMs to groups (formal or ad-hoc) in the mix because the permission system becomes messy. Tags do not have permissions like categories. It would be hard to check if a user can use templates or not, or even limit his ability to do so.
Some things that come to my mind now that have to be addressed:
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Which users should be allowed to use private templates? I don’t think they should be allowed by default to everyone and currently the permission to use the plugin is defined by the category in which the templates are stored. This permission model wouldn’t work for private templates and we would probably need a new setting so admins can control that.
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The tag used to mark private messages as templates should be defined globally in the plugin configuration or allow each user to define in the user settings which tag should be considered a template? How would that work for messages shared by more than one person?
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One thing that I don’t like that much about it, is that it can make harder to find where to go when you need to edit/discuss a template. The users will need to know if it is a PM or a topic. It is not a deal breaker but it can become cumbersome.
TL;DR: I really liked personal templates (PMs to yourself), I think that PMs to multiple people used as templates may cause some issues and this would have to be thought with care. Personally, I would go with really private templates (only the user that created can see) and leave group templates (2+ people) to the category system.