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Forum: Site Goals and Ideas
Thread (Discussion): Forum and Privacy Issues
Message 145854
Posted by deadmomwalking
on Feb 19, 2005 09:26 PM | Also by deadmomwalking
| Gender: Female,
Age Bracket: 30 - 39,
State: N/A,
Country: Canada |
I am responding to oioi's post about being surpised to see her posting come up in a google search. I remember having the same experience when googling a phrase, something about letters to rapists, and having my posting here pop up first. I realized that that could happen, of course, because that was exactly how I ended up on this forum in the first place, by googling a question and being directed to a post on this forum - still it was a bit of a shock - that my post would be first. I might be wrong but I think part of the reason for this is that your computer keeps track of the sites you visit again and again and those sites will have higher priority in your googling than others. For example, if my brother on the other side of the country googled the same phrase on his computer, I don't necessarily think he would come up with the same order of results.
I think we sometimes get carried away in our postings and think that there is a modicum of privacy here and that even if we know anyone at all COULD access our posts that it is highly unlikely anyone we know would. We imagine we are having private conversations in someone's living room or kitchen , when, in fact, we are in a cable company broadcast studio, albeit with bags over our heads. Still, it’s quite possible that people we know would recognize us.
I have participated in a number of forums like this where you have to sign in to post. There are others where you actually have to sign in to view the postings and some have a mix - some forums that are publicly accessible and others which cannot be viewed unless you are a member. Usually the posts in the "private" forums do not show up on google. So that is one option to consider, having some forums being "private". Of course they are not really private because anybody can sign in and view them but it does prevent people just stumbling over them. However, whether you wanted to do this would depend on the objectives of the site. If you want a higher public profile, then, obviously, restricting public access in any way, is counter-productive to the aims of the site.
I participated in a forum about eating disorders. Like here, there were two “sides”. Sufferers of eating disorders obviously had different issues than their loved ones and some effort was made to keep the two sides apart. Parents wanted a place to post where they could cry and get support and ideas from other parents and not have victims or their husbands ranting about how they had "caused" the eating disorder in the first place. Similarly sufferers wanted to be able to vent about all their issues without parents or other loved ones telling them how irrational they were being. So you had to sign in to each forum and the forum moderators actually made some sort of effort to make sure that mothers and daughters didn't end up in catfights on the same forum. Every now and then a sufferer would post on the parents' forum and there would be loud objections from some parents and vice versa. There were a lot of guidelines about what could and couldn't be posted on the sufferer's board. As an example, sufferers were never allowed to state their weight or methods they used to diet because that would be triggering for other sufferers. The same went for the general forum. The parent forum didn’t have the same restrictions. Of course if a parent posted that she thought it was great that her daughter was 30 lbs underweight because it was going to help her modeling career she would be blasted to smithereens by the other parents.
There was a general forum but it didn't actually get much use - so that is the danger of that sort of approach. The two sides would get entrenched in their own forum and there wasn’t a lot of discussion between the two sides that might have been useful, even if painful.
I suppose the most significant difference in that board was that everyone had the same goal - beating the eating disorder (sufferers were not to post on the site if they were not in "recovery") although there were a lot of differences of opinion in how that was to be accomplished and what everyone's role was. Whereas I don’t think the two “sides” here have the same goal - regardless of what some may claim. Actually I don’t think the “sides” here are that clear-cut. Look at Silverthorne.
One feature on some forums that I have been grateful for was the "Edit" button. Posters could go back and "edit" or "delete" their own posts, on sober second thought. Like here, people were often traumatized and very emotional and would sometimes post when it would have been better if they had waited until they weren't so emotional. Or people would respond to another post angrily and then regret it later. Or sometimes people would suddenly realize that their posts were in fact publicly viewable and realize they had written too much that might identify them and get them into trouble with their families. Of course, these were all mental health forums, so sometimes it was like, “I was having a psychotic break when I wrote that last post so I have deleted it. Sorry everyone.”
Anyway long preamble (as usual) my two suggestions for this board are:
1. an “edit” button, which would allow users to go back and edit or remove their own posts (their “edits” would show up beneath their posts, as in, “this posted edited X times by X”
2. as item number 1 under Forum Guidelines, which users must agree to before signing up, a reminder that all material posted to the forums, except for private messaging, is viewable by the general public and are viewed by search engines which will display posts in search results based on phrases and words used by posters.
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145854, deadmomwalking, Feb 19, 2005 09:26 PM
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