If you go to your own profile and preferences… it’s amazing what you can choose to do…
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I think there are very few users with hidden profiles so it doesn’t normally come up.
In fact, thinking about it you can probably do it yourself - rather than trying to go to the profile of the user you wish to mute, go to your own profile preferences and you will find your list of muted users - add the user there, that way you don’t need to access their profile.
Edit:
Ah, great minds think alike 
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Thanks, @Stella and @billybutcher - I was able to mute in my preferences panel - pax restituitur
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Go to your avatar > Preferences > Notifications > Messages and uncheck the option…
Don’t forget to click Save Changes
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It’s alright for you… there’s smoke coming out of my computer now… and it’s all your fault… 
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Yes, I appreciated that. I was just responding to David’s question. Interesting issue, that someone can be a problem to others on the site and cannot be avoided. In the early days when I joined, I seem to remember endless rambling conversations by two individuals that had little or no relevance/interest for anyone but themselves. Imagine not being able to mute them. 
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I have a solution. Poor a glass of cold Chardonnay over it. It works for me so I’m sure it’ll be fine for a computer 
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I’ll have to test the wine first of course… hic
That’s what I do do, now, but prefer not to have to. In any case it doesn’t get round the the other point I made about having communications in a file which I can get access to, in one place, later at will.
Although I make no comments about the situation in SF, I do know for absolute certain, that PMs in other places can be read by others for whom they are not intended. This in spite of protestations to the contrary. This does not mean that I have written anything libellous or outrageous, but it does somewhat go against the ‘P’ bit about ‘PMs’. 
Never come across that… are you referring to SF? If so you should mention it to @james for investigation/verification.
Reverend Green, in the Library with a spanner?
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Discourse (this forum software) does actually allow admins to see in PMs, which surprised me. Even with safety and security concerns I’d have expected it to be if not impossible, then rather difficult to do, but it isn’t really. There’s a a function called something like ‘imitate’ which allows admins to effectively see through the eyes of a user, so you can see their preferences as they do, go into their PMs, that sort of thing. It does leave a trace on the audit log so if it’s a big organisation with teams of admins and policies, you can’t just get away with having a good old snoop unnoticed, it will be recorded that you did it, but it’s certainly possible, although only by admins.
None of which is in any way to suggest our hosts would do that, or have, I’m not suggesting anything at all, I am literally providing information having used the backend of discourse myself, just to be completely clear.
Or in the words of the immortal Bunter, W: “It wasn’t me, and I wasn’t there when I did it!”
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Why would it surprise you?
I don’t know exactly how SF is hosted but I would expect James to have full access, including the underlying database - with that you can see the PMs whether or not he forum software makes it easy.
Because as I said it’s very easy. I would think in this day and age most users would want at least a suggestion of privacy. If you rent an apartment in a block or book a room in a hotel you pretty much expect whoever owns it to be able to access your room, it comes with the territory, you still don’t leave your doors wide open and give them carte blanche to wander in whenever they like, it’s your personal space so they are restricted to asking you first unless there are limited emergency reasons. I would expect the same in this situation, especially given James and Cat are the anomaly here, many of the world’s biggest companies use Discourse for their forums so there could be teams of dozens of people with access to them, hundreds even. I would expect it to be possible, I would also expect it to be more difficult than pressing one button. Say I am chatting to a friend over PM, I could give them all manner of information I want them to have, but because I am not aware of this I could be making that personal information available to hundreds of complete strangers, which could well be a personal safety risk. It’s only got to take some creep to think my profile picture is nice, see my mobile number I sent to someone, and hey presto I’m getting dick pics galore from some stranger, or worse some nutcase turning up at my door because they’ve worked out where I live from information I thought was private. People are naive. I wouldn’t be naive myself because I know how these things work, but people are daft, they see a PM function, think it’s purely between them and whoever else they choose, and let their guard down.
The point is that as an administrator of a site you need to have the ability to alter any aspect of the site, fix any problem - that pretty much mean access to all the data. It’s possible that Discourse encrypts the data on disk to provide a measure of protection but the keys have to be available to the software and hence to anyone who has ful control over the hardware and software installation.
There is a degree of trust involved - I run the family email server and my wife and son trust me not to read their personal messages unless the system is broken, and even then to access the minimum amount of data, for James and Cat this expectation of trust is backed up by the GDPR, but the *ability* to access the data has to exist otherwise James can’t admin the site properly.
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I can only imagine I’m wording it badly as you don’t seem to be understanding. I think we’re coming at it from different angles. I understand and agree, none of that was what I was saying. But that’s cool.
So what were you saying? Forgive me if I missed the point.
If your point was that you were surprised it (access) was so easy my point is that it has to be there, so might as well be easy to save the admin even more headaches.
I wasn’t saying anything, this has transpired because you asked me something I made a throwaway comment about the fact that it was even easier than I expected to view PMs, and you asked me why I was surprised! It wasn’t something I’d even given much thought to and wasn’t expecting to be asked why, and I kinda with I hadn’t even mentioned it now lol, I was just trying to be informative 
OK, I - err, think
It was just that your surprise, surprised me. Administrators of a site generally have full control.
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