I do appreciate this website and all you volunteers, let me start by saying thank you for that.
Sometimes however I do find some of the moderation a tad over the top. If I cannot swear when going through the worst time in my life when can I?? I can understand if I’m insulting someone and calling them names but when I swear in context within a personal message not in public view where I doubt the recipient reported me then I find it a bit creepy because I also don’t see why you are reading those private messages.
I know you’re all doing your best but just I’ve seen several people leave this site already due to what could be perceived as heavy handed moderation. You are forcing us into having no option but to give out personal phone numbers to people we don’t know then when people don’t want to use the site anymore if we want to keep in touch. This is a place we are trying to release some steam during the worst time of our lives, please give us a break…
Am I understanding this correctly?
Is someone monitoring the PMs I send?
The usual reason for me using a PM is that I’m giving out some information which is not for public consumption.
I am really sorry to hear you are upset by our moderation. As part of the Online Community Team, I for one am not aware we moderate PMs. We are required to keep the site safe for all of our members, and be consistent and sympathetic in our actions.
Would you be so kind, and email in your complaint, then Aife can look at it in detail?
I have had this as well recently, I pm several people and we were shocked to see a padlock appear and that a moderator had removed a few swear words on another occasion we had discussed wanting to die which was also removed We thought it was only if a post had been flagged or was offensive to others it was removed not when adults are having what we all thought was confidential communication between eachother. It was the same mod every time in my case. I find it terribly disconcerting and very much like ’ big brother is watching you’ Surely it is called a PRIVATE message for a reason!
I feel like I’m being gaslighted… am I nuts or are there two Audrey’s as mine was also padlocked and then said Audrey was editing my private PM but Audrey in this thread says private messages are not being read… eh…
I feel a bit shocked tbh and not sure what to make of this.
Hi everyone, thank you for letting me know about this. I can understand your concerns, I’ll take a look into this and will lock the thread in the meantime and get back to you as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience while I looked into this today. I really appreciate you raising this, it’s completely understandable to hear your concerns about PMs being read. To confirm our moderation processes, we don’t monitor private messages, and will only read them if someone has reported them. We have a bit more information about our moderation in our Terms and Conditions - https://community.sueryder.org/pub/terms-conditions
After doing some investigating today, we’ve found there’s been an issue with a feature of the community which reports posts to moderators and staff. It seems this has also temporarily been flagging a few PMs which the system thinks is a post which goes against the guidelines.
We’re going to review our training and processes urgently, and get in touch with all of our moderators with some additional training to make sure this all gets resolved. Please be assured your PMs aren’t something that we monitor, and we understand how worrying this might have been to you.
I hope this has helped ease any uncertainty. Once again thank you for bringing this to our attention, we really appreciate your help in keeping the community a safe and supportive space.
We’re going to keep this thread locked, but if you would like to get in touch to talk about this in more detail, you can email me at online.community@suerydercare.org.
on another occasion we had discussed wanting to die which was also removed 
We thought it was only if a post had been flagged or was offensive to others it was removed not when adults are having what we all thought was confidential communication between eachother. It was the same mod every time in my case. I find it terribly disconcerting and very much like ’ big brother is watching you’ Surely it is called a PRIVATE message for a reason!
as it was you who did the removing on several occasions!