Quote Originally Posted by asai View Post
A ban can be reversed - reading someone's PMs cannot. Some of the members here are very long term, have been here for more than a decade and probably use this forum to stay in touch, some may know each other by name, where each other live, etc. I honestly don't believe that attempting to justify that PMs can be read, or that members should not expect them to be private, as some have argued is the answer to this.
This - for me - is the key point, and why this is unacceptable. I have real life contact with maybe half a dozen members on this board through other mediums like facebook, I'm probably unique in that I use my real name as a handle, but I'm far from the first member to put it in their sig or profile.

The point is - the PM system is not disconnected from my real life, without looking I couldn't be sure what was in there - I shouldn't have to EVER worry about the staff looking.

What was done was clearly, unambiguously, wrong. If it were not, we would not have been informed. Consider this, suppose Jan's account had not been hacked? Then where would be? It seems to me that the PM's wouldn't have been read unless it was fairly certain it was Warman anyway.

Right, that's it. I really am done now.