@david: sorry to jump in to the conversation, but I have a very similar use case to @Geoffrey_Challen, and while I certainly can’t speak for him, I think one concrete thing that would help me along these lines would be to have the option to run a single search query in a way that matches both public topics and private messages (right now it seems I can search for public topics or private messages but not both, unless I’m missing something).
I understand that some of the other changes suggested here (“Create” permission, allowing PMs to display in the regular topic lists, etc) involve sweeping and complicated changes, but maybe a change to search to allow searching across all topics (public or PM) would be more practical and more local, while still providing the ability to get some semblance of a unified view of those things via search
For me, I don’t think overriding the default interface is important, but it would be fantastic if I had some way to quickly answer the question of “What are all of the threads I might need to respond to right now?” regardless of whether they were public or private, and to refine that based on tags, etc.
In the meantime, I wrote a little script that I can use to grab this kind of unified list directly from the Postgres database, or I can run two separate queries through the search dialog for each thing I want to search (one for public and one for private), but both of those are kind of painful…