If I go to my private messages here, I can see PMs that I deleted years ago after saving them offline… Although I know that the “Internet does not forget anything”, I find this quite disconcerting, especially as I don’t see any function here for deleting messages. Is there a way to do this?
It looks to me like I can delete my PMs. I see a trash can icon when i click the dot dot dot.
@ Meno4 (or is it William?). You really should change your password - and not make it public this time. It is still possible for others to log into your account and post in your name. Well, I have no interest in doing that and was just curious if it’s still possible. But there may be others who could make a joke out of it.
@ Flannel Jesus. When I go to my PMs, there is no “trash can” icon there. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, or maybe you as a moderator have other options. When I click on the 3 dots, I only see the “privately flag” and the “bookmark” icons.
It’s not that important now, but it was important a few years ago when I translated James’ posts and we exchanged several thousand PM’s. I had to delete PMs because of course the site couldn’t store that many, and also, because I wanted to keep them private… It’s just strange that many of those deleted messages have now reappeared.
That is a bit surprising, but on reflection my guess is that the PMs were only deleted from your inbox, but still visible to other users in the conversation, and restored to your inbox by the migration script.
PMs can’t be deleted on this software either, again because they are owned by all parties to a conversation. You can remove them from your inbox by archiving them.
I understand your concerns about privacy, but PMs aren’t intended as a method of secure communication. They aren’t encrypted at rest (i.e. they are stored in plaintext in the database), and anyone with administrator access to the site or server can read them. Right now that’s only me, and for whatever it’s worth you have my word that I would only access them if you or the recipient asked me to review them (e.g. if there were an allegation of misuse/abuse), or by court order.
But if the server were hacked, if I die and my ne’er-do-well heirs take over, if I develop a brain tumor and go rogue, or if my word is not worth the pixels its printed on, PMs could be compromised. If that’s a concern, you should use a service that’s end-to-end encrypted; I can’t speak from experience, but I’ve heard good things about Signal for messaging, and Proton Mail for encrypted email.