I personally have them hidden on my forums and have it so that only I the admin can initiate a chat with people.
I don’t have many users so I dont know the impact of this. From my standpoint, it’s a fear of me as admin having access to the raw data of the personal chats and not knowing how to deal with it legally if something were to happen.
Now that Discourse Encrypt is deprecated, I don’t know if I even want people to have the ability to send any private message in general.
I fear the legal responsibility of messages that people think are private but are not private to the admin, I almost want to link people to chat on Signal or Whatsapp.