Forum adjustments 6/15

[Onio]

After some concerns, I've set member introductions to be visible only to registered members who have had their membership applications accepted.

I've also been considering.. setting all posts to only be visible to registered members. This would take a bit of time to configure the permissions, but essentially, anyone who isn't logged in would only be able to see post topics and not read the posts themselves. What are your opinions on this? Should forum posts be visible to all? Visible to none? Should it vary from one board to the next? Ideally people don't share any personal information they wouldn't be comfortable with the world reading about here as it is, should the board remain open and people are responsible for what they share? Maybe there a good argument against closing post visibility to prevent web scraping?

[Nhasasite]

Uhh, I think it should be visible to all, honestly, except member introductions. Like either way, if ur sharing information on here, regardless of whether the person seeing it is registered or not, you don't know them. Like i dont know anyone here irl and im registered. " should the board remain open and people are responsible for what they share?"- yeah I think ur responsible for what u share.

[cnroddball]

What concerns might they be? What prompted this?

[Pleco]

Speaking from my own experience, I joined this forum because I saw some topics I wanted to contribute to while lurking.

This forum already has more steps to joining than most others. I believe potential newcomers won't be so willing to join if they can't tell if those extra steps are worth it.

[GlitchWolf47]

Uhh, I think it should be visible to all, honestly, except member introductions. Like either way, if ur sharing information on here, regardless of whether the person seeing it is registered or not, you don't know them. Like i dont know anyone here irl and im registered. " should the board remain open and people are responsible for what they share?"- yeah I think ur responsible for what u share.

Yeah I think you should keep them visible. Ive had an issue with other forums before where all the threads and stuff are only visible to registered users so i made an account just to see the posts and what people talk about but then ended up not even really being interested in the forum. I think maybe just having the actual contents of the posts hidden and the posts themselves visible on the front page could be good.

Speaking from my own experience, I joined this forum because I saw some topics I wanted to contribute to while lurking.

This forum already has more steps to joining than most others. I believe potential newcomers won't be so willing to join if they can't tell if those extra steps are worth it.

Also yeah I agree with this too

[Onio]

What concerns might they be? What prompted this?

A particular user thought I was asking for too much personal information in the application, and since I don't mention it in the application, they didn't realize there would be a mandatory member introduction as their first post. They read the part [since removed] where I wrote "this post should be all about you, tell us everything about you!" (or something similar to that effect) and understood that as me trying to pull out as much personal information from them as possible. They were concerned this was a phishing project and asked for their account to be deleted.

I deleted their account and reassured them no personally identifying information is needed or desired, that it's simply an extra step that does a decent job of filtering out the kind of spammy/low effort material that might come from interaction styles that are better suited for a chatroom, and that additionally it gives them an opportunity to share who they are with the community.

That said, it had me rethink some things, such as whether the membership introductions and even posts could contain too much personal information to keep public, away from web crawlers/ai scrapers/etc. I did reword some of the pinned introduction topic to clarify that personal information is not what we're seeking, we're just trying to build community.

I think I might adjust some things to help set better expectations, such as a notice during the application process that the user will be expected to write an introduction post, and I'll keep the member introductions board visible but keep the topics inside the board themselves private, so people can see it before signing up. I think I'll also likely adjust visibility of other boards for new users, so they can still read and react to posts before making their introduction, but cannot reply or create new topics.

[SummerO]

It sounds like you got some useful feedback from someone who took things very literally and responded in a balanced way to me, Onio.

I would say though that there are people on here who are expressing themselves and 'who they are' without even giving away gender, or location. So I don't think the concern is huge in general, it's a matter of being creative in what one chooses to say about oneself - and being aware, obviously of what is and is not public.

So, you've got these things sorted from my perspective.

[Nhasasite]

Yeah I think that guy took it a bit too literally..
I think how it is right now is fine honestly