I wanted to see exactly what sort of behavior private messages have before I go using it to plan sexual trysts and distribute credit card numbers, so I set up a little test, and found a curious result.
Three users, A, B, and C. I started a private discussion from A to B. I confirmed that both users can see and post in the discussion, while C can't. But to make things interesting I went back in as A and whispered comments to C. I suspected this wouldn't work, but it did. However, A is the only one who can see this comment! B can't, which makes sense, and C still can't see that the discussion even exists. Fair enough, I suppose, but it's slightly worrisome that, as A, I can post something and maybe never know that my intended recipient simply can't ever see it.
I assume the behavior would be the same if I tried this as B.
Ahhhhh. Wierd. I never thought about it from that point of view.
In my mind, if you start a discussion and whisper it to someone, that makes it a private discussion between you and that person. I could have sworn I made it so that the basic rules of whispering still apply within a private discussion, though.
I mean, if you're having a discussion with A and you whisper to B in that private discussion, neither A OR B should see the whisper. B is limited by the fact that it is already a private discussion between yourself and A, and A is blocked from the comment by the basic rules of whispering (it wasn't intended for A).
If I mucked that up, that's a bug that will be fixed in the next rev.
the explanation makes sense, mark... the only problem is that I'm not warned that NO ONE will be able to see what I just wrote. I guess all I'm saying is that in this case I need to see an error page which says "You can't share a private discussion with a third party" or something like that. y'know, before all hell breaks loose in infoland.
actually, I just thought of a more elegant solution.
since, once it is begun, a private discussion serves as strictly A-to-B, why not disable the Whisper input entirely? It would still be there so the initial user can create the discussion, of course, but thereafter you could replace the text input with static text prefilled with the recipient, so user A would always see "Whisper your comments to B" and user B would always see "Whisper your comments to A". No point in giving users the illusion of functionality when no choice actually exists, right?