A proposal has been made to add “private whispers” or “private notes” to topics, allowing users to post personal notes that only they can see. codinghorror suggests that sending PMs to oneself, a feature available since 1.6 beta, could serve a similar purpose.
sam mentions that improving whisper support is on the long-term plan, but not scheduled for a specific release. One potential feature, whisper permission groups, which would allow specifying which groups can see whispers, is likely 2 years away.
sam explains that implementing whisper permission groups would be a complex change, requiring significant updates to the permission model and unread count tracking. This would involve renaming columns, making changes to the permission model, and ensuring no performance impact, potentially requiring 2 weeks of work. loginerror expresses interest in this feature.
Since we introduced the “animals database” in our goat farming community, people would like to add “private” messages (aka whispers) in their own topics and use it like personal notes.
Hence this proposal to add a “private whisper” or “private note” for users to post into topics. I love the universal “private note” name.
Anyone would like such a feature? How would you use it?
For notes, people can send PMs to themselves as of 1.6 beta.
Is this also possible to be planned or not really?
Improving whisper support is on our long term plan, but not slotted on to any particular release.
Maybe one day we will support whisper permission groups, but this is probably 2 years out to say the least.
Being able to specify which groups can see whispers would be lovely 
It would be a terribly complicated change, even more complicated than last time I looked at this.
The problem is that we have lots of code that keeps “unread counts” on topics list right even if whispers are around. So there are a bunch of columns that track “what staff can see - count” vs what “non staff can see - count”.
At a minimum we would have to rename all that stuff but then there would be even more changes to permission model and so on. It is quite a huge change probably 2 weeks of work to get it working right with no performance impact beyond what we have today.