General Discussion

There are many reasons why we switched from the moderator system to the Jury system, but one of them was the problems involved with maintaining the integrity of the private moderator forum. People who weren't moderators didn't like the idea that other members had a private space to talk about them behind their backs, and people who were moderators expected a certain level of privacy to hold discussions about rule violations -- and we couldn't 100% guarantee that privacy. Meanwhile trolls over at various conservative websites would brag about how they'd "infiltrated" the moderator forum, even though they hadn't -- but as a psychological warfare tactic it worked pretty well, because members would see those brags and believe that there were trolls moderating DU.

It's why members who serve on MIRT are reminded that the MIRT forum on DU is not "private" even though it is access-restricted, so they should expect that anything they say in there could potentially find its way out. It's a reminder to people to try and keep things on-task and generally professional while serving on MIRT -- there is basically no "social" chat in the MIRT forum (unless someone is just letting people know that they're going to be away for a little while, or something like that).

But regardless, making DU "private" isn't something that's even in the planning stages -- it's just a contingency plan in my own mind at the moment.