Personal Messages?
And some people like the monitor PMs to see if there is any illegal activity going on through members.

Yes. There are many valid reasons one might want to know what users are posting between each other. The folks arguing for privacy should practice it. That's fine for them. I don't normally look at members PMs - I could care less what they post, but about 2 years ago I had a need and used the old hack for vB 2.x. A member was trading in copyright documents, I caught him and booted him.

I wouldn't have even posted, but it gets old hearing the 'privacy' arguement. We're running public boards. Anyone with an expectation of total privacy in a public forum is silly. They should be getting together in a park somewhere to talk if they want absolute privacy. Even then - who knows what 'intelligence' service might be listening to their conversation in the name of 'terrorism prevention' or some such.

In addition, opposition to such a hack to read PMs suggests they cannot be read otherwise when they can be read relatively easily with any database editor or viewer. The whole 'privacy' arguement is absurd.

My board has got like 13.000 members. About 8.200 have provided their birthdate and out of them 2.100 are younger then 18.

Nobody must. Private is private is private.

I know. And that's pretty bad.
Even though it is possible, one should NOT make it even easier.
Maybe i'll write a hack to provide real private messages ... when i've got enough time.

Well every thing aside, I used to use the 100 latest PMs hack for vB2 and found it very useful... When I was running vB2 I used to see at least one person a month spamming their boards URL to hundreds of members. So I need to keep ontop of it... Besides every one knows that private messages are not really private. If they want to keep things private they can use the inbuilt vBulleting mailing system to email other members. Im not exactly going to monitor those...

Bump.. I really need someone to make this... I think it will be useful for alot of other people aswell..

I am also looking for this hack.

I ported this one over long ago for a customer, personally I never have used it just not my thing.

I think private is private... there is nothing I need to know that bad on my site... if someone spams I will hear about it.