Quote:
Originally Posted by Bklipp91
I understand the PRIVATE part, but I know that the Anonymous message system could be tracked, so I wanted to make sure. STILL not planning a coup d'etat...   |
The anonymous posting system
CANNOT be tracked in its present form. If there is abuse, we can and will reinstall the hack and see who the troublemaker is.
Now, Private Messages are a different story. Private messages are not encrypted and CAN be read by someone with database access to the forum server. The only two users with this type of access are
DkHelmet and
Rjaniz. To date, neither of them has ever read any private messages, although I will admit we did discuss it once regarding a member that we suspected of being a pedophile. Obviously this was an extreme case, and we took it very seriously. The member in question went away on his own, and we have never read ANY user's PMs.
In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you that all admins can delete a user's PMs in their folders, and we can delete PMs sent by a specific user. We cannot read them through the admin interface, and I
have personally deleted PMs sent by spammers.
On several occasions, the C3 staff has been alerted to other members misbehaving by
other concerned members that have forwarded PMs to us. The most famous case was
Dean Amicks harassing PMs to a younger member of C3. We got involved at the younger member's request and straightened it out. To date, this is the only way we have ever seen another member's private messages (they were sent to us by a party involved in the messaging).
ETA: Admins can also enable/disable a user's ability to send and receive PMs. We have done this with a few troublemakers in the past, but not recently.
