Subject:
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Re: Change in handling of real names on LUGNET web pages?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.suggestions
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Date:
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Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:35:52 GMT
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Viewed:
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3624 times
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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, Gereon Stein wrote:
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Hi all,
recently we receive quite a number of requests from individual users to have
their real names and/or profile pages removed from search engine result
pages.
snip
My suggestion therefore would be - as is common practice with some of the
more recent communities out there - to implement some sort of “self-service”,
allowing every registered (!) user to set a flag in their profile, deciding
whether or not their profile, real name and other personal information should
be accessible to the public. Note that whatever implementation approach we
may take, availability of such profile and name information must at any time
remain accessible to registered users, since otherwise the whole community
approach would be put to question. However, since search engines work as
everything but a registered user, users deciding on keeping their profile
private will eventually not find their real names or profile contents in
search engines any more. This also applies to posts in the LUGNET newsgroups,
where the web display for unregistered visitors would show some generic text
instead of the real name and email address.
snip
I am very curious as to what you think about these suggestions/proposals. We
would want to find a solution that both helps those of you looking for more
privacy and still keep the community as such functional.
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I think this is a good move in the right direction.
A quick tangent: for those of us who have been around the LEGO community for
awhile now, having our real names out in public on LUGNET has helped me to
associate names of builders to people I meet at LEGO conventions/events. And
I’m also active on Flickr, where people can post pictures and be anonymous to a
certain degree. And for all of my the LEGO ‘friends’ on Flickr, I know half of
them by name and the other half by a username. My only suggestion, if you allow
people to be anonymous to the general public, I’d still enforce a type of
‘username’, so the username is displayed if the user elects to be anonymous.
Now, there is the question of what if a person wants to elect to be anonymous
even within the LUGNET community? Should this be allowed? Is there a
particular need for it? etc. Most on-line communities allow for this...
Usernames are generally associated with an e-mail address or a group of e-mail
addresses. I think the idea behind it at one time was to help cut down on
fraud, but obtaining a new e-mail address is easy enough to do. Being anonymous
is not wrong in of itself, but what’s wrong is fraud, spam-bots, and
griefer. Other on-line communities employ
a “number of postings” system and/or a community “title” given to how active
they are within the community. Generally, people with a higher number of
postings aren’t going around committing fraud -- they might steal Star Wars LEGO
from Target, but that’s another story. It’s the griefer that you can’t write
programs to prevent; but the great thing about a griefer’s personality is that
they get bored quickly and move on.
Personally, I think if given the option, if someone elected to be anonymous even
within the LUGNET community, I don’t think it would prevent the community from
functioning... the community would simple have to adapt.
It’s been awhile since I’ve dealt with NNTP on a programmatic level, but can the
‘username’ be employed when posting to NNTP via the web? For instance, if I
post a response via the web interface, once it’s been submitted to NNTP, can
“Username fakemail@lugnet.com” be used as the poster (assuming the e-mail
address resolves to a valid e-mail address, but might be an internal alias to
/dev/null)? The idea here would be to maintain anonymity even via the NNTP
server. This give the anonymous post an option to remain so, but only if he/she
posts via the web.
It’s archaic, but there are still some bots that spider through NNTP servers
looking for information -- you might be able to shut access down to them
quickly, but once the damage has been done, it’s done. If the above approach
can be implemented, it will at least ease the thoughts of some people...
The other thing to think about is e-mails are sent out to e-mail subscribers...
I would assume they have people’s real names & real e-mail addresses. E-mails
can be intercepted. When are subscriber e-mails generated? I assume it’s a
script ran against the NNTP directory after a message has been submitted (some
are e-mailed immediately, a cron file/script for the queued ones). Assuming
everything is triggered after a message has been submitted to the NNTP server,
if you can implement the above, you’d help maintain an anonymity even if
subscription e-mails are intercepted.
Something else to think about, once a person ‘elects’ to be anonymous, should
something be done about past postings? On one hand, it’s a simple enough
search-n-replace script of all files, replace s/real name/username/ & s/e-mail
address/fake e-mail addres/... but I think the ‘election’ should be a one-time
thing. If you elect to be anonymous, you can not elect to go public again. In
which case, it’s suggested that you create a new/separate/public account.
One other thing, I’d think about changing the sign-in to LUGNET, editing your
profiles, & posting messages via the web to be done over https.
And another thing... :) Most new readers support reading NNTP over SSL & can
require you to authenticate, with a valid username/password. I know it goes
against the open-door policy, but it’s also something else to consider.
I’ve always thought there should be a general discussion area on LUGNET & a
private/or 18+ older area, locked down by username/passwords... A private area
could ran under NNTP over SSL, and the web-pages could be cloned/re-written to
work with this new private area. I know this opens up a whole new can of worms,
but it’s something else to consider. It’s always been my opinion why some LEGO
clubs have moved off of LUGNET to Yahoo Groups or Google Groups is because a
subscription/private area was never offered on LUGNET -- club member wanted to
do event planning without the passing interloper. The idea of permissions and
access rights isn’t fun to deal with -- there are technologies like OpenLDAP to
deal with it -- but it also might mean rewriting your authentication model. One
idea would be to offer the private area, but not have NNTP access to it; maybe
maintain it via NNTP, but prevent those directories from being served up to the
general public via the NNTP server. Just food for thought...
--Mike.
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