I have a professional forum, and a lot of visitors try ask their questions in private messages to me, not in a public topic.
If a visitor is not a paying customer, I have no motivation to solve his/her problems in private messages, but in some cases can do so in a public topic, because it could be a useful content for other visitors.
So an ability to move a private topic a public category would be great.
I see a request for the reverse feature: Flag option “convert into PM”, and it is also very useful for a professional forum.
I see also a partial solution (which is originally for the reverse case, but it works in the both directions): create a new public topic, then select and move all the messages from the current private topic.
It solves the problem only partially because I have to create a new topic with a some non-sense topmost post (there is no ability to create a topic without a post), and the new topic will have another author (the original author’s question will only be the second message in the new post).
There is also another partial solution: make a non-sense answer in the private topic, then select all the topic’s posts without the latest and move it to a new topic (the ability to move posts to a new topic is available only if not all topic’s posts are selected).
A good solution would be an ability to just specify a public category for a private topic, as we have in the public topic editing scenario.
Agreed, this could be helpful for us. Sometimes people reply to the automatic “site welcome” message that comes from my account, rather than posting their question(s) as a new topic.
When somebody asks you a question by repying in an existing private conversation, it is not so big problem, because you can move his question to a new public topic (I have described it above as the second partical solution).
The real problem is when a somebody asks a question in a new private conversation, because there is no a useful way to convert all the conversation into a public topic.
