In my opinion, the one key change needed to make this work really well would be for PMs to be treated as Private Topics (rather than messages) for those sites who have chat enabled.
This would retain the existing (excellent) functionality, but be cleaner, simpler, and more effective due to removing the big fat silo between PMs and Topics. It would also remove the confusion between DMs and PMs.
How might this look?
- A dedicated category called
Private Topicswhich each user watches by default - Populated with all of the PMs/Private Topics a user can see (i.e. basically their current inbox latest + sent combined)
- Filterable by users/groups
- These topics appear in the /Latest list and are included in search