Okay I just read the 17 page thread in the 2.2 section and the 7 page thread in this section. I'm disappointed by what I saw, but not at all surprised. It is sadly typical in such situations that only a small handful of people will take a stand against undermining civil liberties such as protection of personal privacy while many others will eagerly trample others rights in favor of maximizing their personal power and control.

Ethical arguments aside, there was no reasonable challenge to Bira's legal points, either. And no, I don't consider your "phpMyAdmin does the same thing" argument effective. As Bira pointed out, you install this hack to read PM's, period. The odds are slim that you install phpMyAdmin for that sole purpose. I strongly encourage anyone who reads this to heed Bira's advice and forewarn their users that their PM's are not private if this hack is installed.

And lastly, the only somewhat reasonable arguments I read in either of those threads (i.e. prevention of spam, porn, warez, and threats) can now be easily handled by simply requesting that your users forward any such PM's to the administration, given the fact that "forward" is now a built in feature that wasn't available when these points were first made.

So with all this in mind, do you have any other justification for enabling easy access to your user's PM's?

The only thing sadly typical is that you read through all that and still decided your opinion was special enough to make another post about it in another thread AGAIN.

The major point all of you guys are missing is that NO ONE CARES. All this hypothetical debate does is demonstrate the absolute height of internet nerdism. Jesus but this stuff gets old.

In short, please take your arguments to one of the other threads. Thanks.

I don't think it is a good idea to criticize any hack and question its morality as everyone has his own needs.

Someone ought to be crazy to sit and go to its members PM. But there will be situations sometimes where you need to access records (that's how I view those PM), not necessarily to snoop around. Then what do you do? Go to mysql? I'll be silly to deny yourselves with fast access to those records.

Someone who is sick enough to snoop on people can do so by accessing the database. He'll be compelled to do it with or without this hack.

As administrators, you have some responsibilities. The same way that you will not be snooping your mysql, I don't see why you will have to do so because of a hack.

I think that if the author renames this hack to "quick access to all pm" instead of "read your members pm" it would have caused less roar.

What you are saying is correct tmhall :) However, as long as you let you users know then it's perfectly legal

shouldn't users also know that you can easily access them thru mysql?

It's not a case of what the user should know. I hardly think that a 10 year old new to the internet who just found a UnrealTournemant forum via a search would know anything about MySQL :)

It's your legal responsibility as site owner to have a privacy policy to cover yourself and explain the usage of data on your site :)

This is a despicable hack and I cannot understand why vb.org administrators can allow it.

There is a reason why "private messages" are called "private". And it's NOT valid to say that the admin can read them easily with phpMyAdmin - this is so because it cannot be avoided. But the hack even encourages an admin to read PNs!

I doubt that this is even legal in most countries ...

awesome, this hack will be good for security measures :)

Personally, I couldn't ethically justify ever installing or using this hack, however there have already been pages and pages of debate on this subject.

It is the individual admin's choice to install it or not, and the debate just circles and circles.

If this is a bug fix, why didn't you contact me or scott about it so we can release an update and credit you for the bug fix? Now we have 2 threads, nothing but confusion.

If you'd have asked me, I would have said 'yeah sure, go ahead', now I just shrug and leave it to the site staff to process.