Originally Posted by
LowCel
Private messages are intended to be just that, private. I'm really not sure what is so hard to understand about the word "private".
What is the point of having private messages if one of the people are just going to post them in a public forum?
Private does not necessarily mean confidential. The message is private because it is initially accessible only to the person who it is sent to rather then public posted in a thread. That has nothing to do with confidentiality of the information contained. Most boards have PMs yet none that I know of have a confidentiality policy. This board doesn't even have an official one as far as I can tell.
1. For forum members to communicate with each other about topics that don't involve the forum as a whole.
For instance "Want to meet at 7:30 instead of 8:00"?
2. To send a user information that you want to make sure they get. For instance instead of merely posting to the thread in which livewire posted about his love for skidding on trails I also sent him a pm that I could be more sure he would read. Likewise I did the same when I reposted his PM here.
More importantly though it's just common practice.