Very few situations where I use Make Personal Message involved behaviours where all Staff needed to receive an automatic notification and be updated on every subsequent reply, and to invite all Staff automatically defies members’ expectations of what a Personal Message topic is.
Example: members get into a heated discussion or go slightly off-topic, but no bad will or rule-breaking as such, mod makes it private so they can thrash it out in peace and not derail topic – this does not require all Staff receive notifications until they log-in to remove themselves from the message topic.
If this is changed, I would have to explain that I made that section a PM because it was going off-topic, but also, all Staff are now getting notifications of every subsequent post – this is not Make Personal Message so much as Take You Off The topic But Invite All Staff To Your Chat.
Another thing I use Make Personal Message for is when a troll joins, and either begins a topic or derails an existing one: members will try to set them straight until it becomes obvious this isn’t possible, I ban troll then make the whole topic, or the derailed section, a PM to save my time, so I don’t have to individually notify people what happened.
I aim for transparent moderation and simply “disappearing” someone, who may have been passing themselves off as simply obtuse or opinionated, and who has got people riled, is not my style – if good members have invested time and effort, I like to give them closure.
This can be especially relevant where the troll is engaging in borderline rule-breaking but when checked, their IP address or other data exposes them as someone who was previously banned, and I wish to let everyone who interacted with their new persona know why that person has been banned, where, perhaps, their actions may simply have seem confused or misguided.
Moderators (and anyone above TL1) already have the option to Invite other Staff to the Personal Message topic very easily if it’s necessary.
And forums already have the option to have a private Staff section to log what was done in the event of rule-breaking, suspensions, and bans.
When I make a topic a PM and have also taken any action that limits a member (ban, suspension, TL demotion or lock), I log these in Staff and copy-paste in relevant material to that post using select > Quote from the topic.
Based on my most recent uses of this function, I believe it will create unecessary notifications to busy Staff, as members continue replying in what is ostensibly the private space a moderator created for them, and this creates notifications eating into the 100 notifications a day limit.
And the Staff in question would need to log-in to opt out of the PM manually to stop receiving these.
May I therefore suggest not making the Staff invitation automatic, but instead offering it as an option to select along the way?