The material presented
here is not Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature. It is a method
to exchange
information, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions on a personal
level.
Someone has eluded to the idea that they thought their anonymity was automatically protected here, but this is a public message board. It can be crawled by google, yahoo, and another search bot that roams around the internet.
If you are using your full name in your registration, instead of just your last initial you are exposing yourself, it is not Miracles In Progress exposing you to search engines. If you use your personal email account to validate your registration, instead of set one up specifically for this purpose, to protect your anonymity, you are exposing yourself. Miracles In Progress is not exposing you or breaking your anonymity, you are any time you post anything in cyberspace with your identity and email attached to it.
There is nothing that can be done about this sort of thing, other than people protecting their own identity by using only first name and last initial, and setting up an email account specifically for this purpose (to verify their message board registration).
The only way to keep the web crawlers off our site or any site at all, and/or our boards would to be to bury them with password protections, which would interfere with the public who is seeking help and support finding it with us. Not only would it make it impossible for people to find and utilize our site, but it would require that someone be in the back ground screening everyone who attempts to obtain the password, to make sure they are qualified for entrance and even then, they would have to be aware that crawlers are designed by legatimate hackers, they are designed to find what is in cyberspace. So, even with all the password protection, the site user would still have to use only their first name, last initial, and a email account set up solely for the purpose of verifying registration on any 12 step site.
I wish there was more I could do to ensure our protection as a whole, collectively, but in the end, it comes down to each individual protecting their own anonymity on the internet.
Yours In the Spirit of Recovery,
John
__________________
" And what did we gain? A new life, with purpose, meaning and constant progress, and all the contentment and fulfillment that comes from such growth."
My question is about email addresses. In "view profile" my email is not shown. However, in "edit profile" it is. In order to change the email listed, would a person have to delete her/his existing account and begin a new one?
__________________
You have to go through the darkness to truly know the light. Lama Surya Das
Resentment is like taking poison & waiting for the other person to die. Malachy McCourt
Ugh. I did change my whatever to my first name only because people were calling me by my name, so I took out my last name. I didn't know if it was showing up or not. So is it possible for others to view my email address? This is so frustrating to me as I used to be on another type of message board and it wasn't quite like this, showing your name stuff.
So what do we do? Change our emails to some other set up? Or is it ok that others can't view it? I am so dumb about this stuff, but I just don't want someone like my ex printing out everything that I ever wrote even though I wouldn't think he even knew. But maybe he does?
