Forum privacy

Just a heads up, all names that have been @'d in the past are now publicly viewable so all the surnames from users of the site who joined while being told their surnames were to be kept privately viewable to registered users of the forum only are now in the public domain and have been indexed by search engines.

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I rest my case …
Geoff take on this is utterly crap (sorry).

Real names were shown on the old forum. We were able to hide them when a user was logged out but that didn’t stop them from being shown if you were quoted. The page in which you enable forum access in your account settings states that real full names will be displayed both on the forum and the user list. Having said that, I can change anyone’s user name per their request - they can just contact me on the forum or write us at hello@xojo.com and we’ll take care of it ASAP.

Julian is talking about quoted names.

Not logged in users saw the quoted names as only ‘Name L’, now all quoted names are shown as ‘Name Last’ so everyone can see the full name, even search engines.

I made a test. Logged myself out and searched for my last name. Found my complete name all over the place…

I’m sorry if I have to write this now, but if Xojo Inc. was based in Germany, I would know exactly what to do now … :frowning:

Even esoTalk would sometimes show full names in quotes when not logged in. With that said, if anyone wants us to scrub old posts and quotes of their full names regardless of when they were posted, let us know and we’ll do that.

It would seem that there were concerns about privacy back with the old forum in that you took the effort to limit the visibility of peoples private information by reducing the visibility of last names to anonymous visitors.

The problem is, a new user would visit your site and before they have logged in or agreed to anything note that last names were protected from anonymous users. That would then be their level of expectation when they signed up for forum access.The language you use on the forum access portion of the account settings “your real name is displayed with your posts” merely says to me that Julian S will be shown instead of my Xojo username (which is different), nowhere does it say my first and last name will be shown to registered users and only after I get access to the site by agreeing to this am I actually made aware of the feature of showing first name and last name. So now you have a situation where some users only gave consent for their first names to be made publicly visible to registered users yet you have given away their last names.

Has there been a conscious decision to no longer care about this? Is this being addressed and has not yet been implemented or is this being forgotten about and will never be a feature of the site going forward?

It shouldn’t be down to the individual users to contact you regarding this asking for their now public information to be redacted from anonymous view, the name display should be made the same way as it was and people should be given the option to opt-in to the new different behaviour and for all new users to be given all the information about how their data is going to be shown moving forward.

As we’re talking about privacy I might as well ask if non-xojo moderators and/or mvp’s have access to any of my private information as some is brought across into the forum software?

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We do not.

Thanks for the quick reply Anthony.

@Dana_Brown, I also note, contrary to your privacy policy that upon adding a ticket to feedback, the first and last name of your customer is made available to the public without their knowledge or consent.

Geoff didn’t personally write Discourse. I would imagine that like most business owners he’s left the forum migration to his staff (who are responding quickly to feedback and tweaking the setup accordingly)

Having your name on the site doesn’t really bother me, our names are usually not unique, I’m friends on Facebook with 4 other Rod Pascoe’s from a few years back when there was a craze to add people with your own name (probably should delete them)

I think context is important.

Mine is unique and i do not use Facebook. For some of us this is more important then for others. :slight_smile:

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Thanks, all, for the comments. For more general information, please refer to the following links:

If you have any further concerns or queries, please contact @Dana_Brown or @Jason_Parsley directly. I’m going to close this as these requests should be directed to them.