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The problem is deciding where to draw the line between private and public discussions.
I can think of a couple of situations where privacy is desirable:
1) Forum moderators discussing whether a user should be disciplined for his behavior. E.g., "Dave_L is causing a lot of trouble with his posting recently. Should we ban him?"
2) Initial posting of a software security issue. My preference would be to first notify a small group of qualified developers of the issue, so that they could quickly develop a patch or other stopgap measure. The issue, along with the corrective measure, would be posted publicly within a day or two, not hidden for months as is done in the case of proprietary software vendors.
But maybe eric is right, and even these types of issues should be public from the outset.
I think the XOOPS organization has gotten off-track by privatizing discussions that should be public, and making decisions that affect the direction of the project out of the sight of the community.