Order Only

[alt_hydra]

I had supper with my family tonight, all of them. Well, not you, Dora (or Bea. Or Sirius). It was Nanella, Pascoal, Uncle Lucius, Aunt Narcissa, Mummy, Daddy, Uncle Raz, Professor Siz, and Draco. It was for my birthday, sort of, only it happened tonight because it was the only evening that everyone was free at the same time.

It was like a lot of family suppers, no one was pretending to be anything they weren't. Well, except for me and for Draco. I tried to pay attention to see if I heard anything that might be useful. I don't know if I did but I'll share it anyway.

First, nobody likes Corax Mulciber. They don't like how he's trying to take control of things, and they also think he's not efficient. Uncle Lucius was able to find out that the man, Boulstridge, that Mr Mulciber called back from his holiday - Mr Mulciber didn't even need him, he just did it because he felt like it, and to show off. Mummy says he's "flashing his cock" instead of doing anything worthwhile.

Mummy also said that Mr Yaxley is unhappy that she and the other Aurors are in charge of monitoring journals now, because he it should be under MLE's control. She said that Yaxley gets more batty every day.

Uncle Lucius was - I think he was panicked, very panicked, when Mr Mulciber tried to take control of the journal monitoring. Mostly because he knew that Mr Mulciber wanted to study Aunt Narcissa's and Draco's journals in particular.

They also talked about Aldrich, a little, because Nanella said something about how she couldn't find any mango stilton (Mummy's favourite) for supper. Mummy wasn't happy that her favourite cheese wasn't served, and it put her in ill spirits. She and Uncle Lucius agreed that the farm must have been taken over by black market opportunists.

And everyone drank a lot of wine.

Well, I don't know if that's helpful, but I thought it might be.

Comments

[alt_sirius]

Bill, Nick, is there any way to make sure that no one at the Ministry can access Draco's private messages with Hermione and Harry? There's a fair amount of sensitive information they wrote under the assumption that the PM crew were flunkies who'd been instructed to ignore certain VIPs. But now it's anyone's guess whether the Aurors will decide (or Bella might) to snoop even on their own near and dear.

We can't really afford that.

[alt_bill]

Sirius, I'm not sure there is any way, unfortunately. I need to do some research. I don't think we can go back and put 'Order Only' on those posts retroactively: people have seen the 'Private message' header already, and it would create a whole host of questions if we could make journal entries and comments disappear months later (and I'm not even sure that would work anyway). Unfortunately, I was frozen out of the team at the time that the Private messaging was set up. Massopust was so bloody jealous of me at that point, he didn't want me to get anywhere near the project, for fear I'd get some of the credit. So I wasn't able to put in any of the back door architecture into the spell of the sort that we're using for the Order Only lock.

[alt_sirius]

Sorry, Bill, I should have been clearer. I wasn't suggesting locking the posts so that they disappear; I was suggesting tampering with the appearance of their private entries so that they are unreadable. I was thinking along the lines of someone metaphorically spilling ink all over any page that starts off with a Private Message heading, so that it's there, but no one looking at it would be able to read what it says.

I'm also aware that it would require a certain amount of skullduggery and sneaking about. But otherwise we have no way to excise what they've written and no guarantee someone on the Auror squad won't arbitrarily decide to find out what the Lord Protector's son and his best friend and servant have to say to one another that's so fascinating it needs all those messages.