[Jim O]

In case there are any questions, the user in question, D-Day Girl, made 17 PM's to five people each. That was a total of 85 recipients. There had been a couple of complaints already and she had ignored a PM sent to her by one of the super mods. My response was to ban her as one of the recipients had shared the content of the PM and it was obvious spam.

Because of the concern as to whether the link contained in the message was malicious I went into the database and deleted the message text from those 17 PM's to those 85 recipients. I also clearly marked that I had done so.

For those that do not understand, the way ALL forums work is that posts and other information, including PM's, are stored in a database. That database is by necessity accessible to the webmaster/administrator. There are times when database administration, maintenance, backup, optimization, etc, demand just that. So I have access to the database. Do I make a habit of reading private messages? Frankly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to do so.

This same type of access is available to admins on virtually all forums.

If the fact that I have such (generally unused) access bothers you then I suggest that you not use the PM system here. After all it's only the government monitoring your email and telephone.