Hmm I think we are talking about a different feature then, especially since you say:
Nothing new is created when you click the wrench and then click “Make Personal Message”.
Its the exact same topic except that it was “re-categorized” as a private message and all the people who replied to the topic are recipients.
We use this feature here on meta if
- Someone posts a security exploit publicly (in which we would also strip some extra recipients)
- A customer posts something that really should have been sent to team email, in which I would invite the team group
That said, even my two examples above have edge cases and adding moderators would not necessarily make stuff any better.
I am happy to just keep status quo for now.
When you turn a topic into a personal message nothing is logged in /admin/logs/staff_action_logs we should log both when you turn something to a PM and when you turn it public.
Cause I was going to audit the last 10 times we used the feature and could not find anything 