Hello I am new here. Thank you for a place to ask questions.

I currently use a website where it appears Mods and or Owners of the chat site/forum are able to view PRIVATE MESSAGES aka PM's sent from one chatter to another. This seems rather invasive to me and the Mods deny they are doing this however many many chatters have experienced being reprimanded for things said in PM's so it would appear this is possible despite the Mods' denials.

I would like to know please if it is possible for Mods or Owners to read the private messages sent between chatters?

Thank you kindly for your efforts to help people understand the system. I have gleened quite alot of useful help here myself.
Regards,
Verity

There are two possibilities here:

1. They are indeed monitoring private messages, which is possible (but unlikely in my opinion).

2. They have set up spamfilters to block certain words or phrases that can be bad or suspicious. When someone triggers such a spamfilter, the network opers are notified of this and can see the message that was sent.

The only way to prevent both 1 and 2 is to start a DCC Chat session with someone instead of a query/private message.

A query is called a private message because it should be private.
With Unreal ircd, noone should be able to see your private message

It must be Unreal IRCd and it's not unlikely at all.

Oh ok, I have edited.
This mean that others IRCd let "admins" see private message ?

I've heard something about admins being able to read PM...but am unsure if this is true. If this is the truth, I'd suggest communicate with others via instant messengers instead.

You left out #3, someone reported what you said in PM.

Every network I have been on Admin wasn't able to read your PM's. Although this never stopped people from spreading the rumor. It is, however, possible for someone to edit their server.

There used to be a module for Unreal that did allow admins to read PM, I remember it caused a few nasty rows, and was decided that IF a server was running such a module it should be advertised in the server motd. However that was a while ago so I cannot verify if it is even available today. Thankfully I have always managed to stay away from Unreal all these years (apart from trying to figure out why it is so popular)
I forgot to mention I also seem to remember it being a 3rd party module.

The 3rd party module referred to will not work with the current version of UnrealIRCd.

The current version of Unreal does have the ability to monitor pm's using the spamfilter option referenced earlier.
The spamfilter will not relay the full text of a pm, but can relay the word(s) that triggered the filter.
My experience as an IRCop and my dealings with others that are IRCops on one or more networks shows that we have bigger problems to handle than to worry about trying to monitor pm's.

As stated, if you are really worried about what you put into a pm being read by someone else, then you should find a different method of relaying that information.

While Instant Messengers were suggested, there is nothing (that I'm aware of) to guarantee that these are any more or any less secure than IRC's pm's.

If you want to ensure that only one person gets the information you are giving out, the only way that I know of, is to give it to them in person.

Even in real life, we can be tracked via our cell phones or by means of satellite. Nothing can really guarantee our safety or privacy these days. lol But usually people get tracked in that fashion are so-called criminals.

True, but that's going a bit on the extreme side.
Odds are if someone is going to worry about that kind of tracking/surveillance, they aren't going to be using an open medium like IRC to conduct business.