Would you ever post the contents of a private message?

[Hime]

The example that glatt posted looked like a pretty obvious troll to me, so I might've posted it in that case, because, well, who cares about trolls?

In general, though, I wouldn't, unless I had the person's permission, and even then only if it was something that wasn't inherently private in nature -- like if I was just chatting with a friend through PMs and they happened to say something funny about, say, Pirates of the Caribbean, I might ask if I could share it with the rest of the class. If they had something funny to say about, say, TheMercenary*, though, that would be a bad thing to post.

On one forum where I used to post, we had some controversy over this issue. Someone got a PM from another user saying that he was using his presence on the forum to gather quotes and examples for an "expose" he was planning to write about the depravity and excesses of liberals on the internet. The person who received the PM posted it without saying who the author was, on the theory that we should know that our words might be taken out of context. I'm not sure if she did the right thing or not, but I guess I'd lean towards yes -- the person who claimed to be writing the book was being a troll.

*nothing personal, dude.