Blog Entry Privacy Is A Must!
The lack of extra privacy options is a huge reason why some people gravitate towards other social networking sites instead of forums. While most let you set your profile either private, public or viewable to your friends, site's like Facebook go the extra mile. Facebook becomes a private site for people who set options like 'Friend's Only' or 'me only'. With Facebook changing things and always having something controversial happen to em it's no wonder that people end up choosing to go elsewhere instead of Facebook.
A forum and it's blog should take advantage of that by having better privacy options. My site started out private and is invite-only. It's active users mostly consist of real people and not aliases, trolls or mysterious faceless peeps. Once we went public though the real problems started rolling in. For each privacy issue that came up, I did my best to fix it and besides ending up learning how to create modifications myself, I also hired coders to create extra privacy modifications.
This blog should take into account the privacy settings of my own site. It should work with
Privacy Usergroups by @
Waindigo Member Card View Permissions by @
Chris Deeming and if possible,
Member's Only Avatars. The blog should allow users to set the privacy of their blog/s and entries. We should be able to select All Visitors, Members Only, People You Follow Only, Selected Users (enter the names of who you want to be able to view your blog) and lastly,
Private User Groups. In my site's case, the selectable Privacy User Group would be VIP / Verified members.
Members should be able to set the default privacy value for new blogs and entries. There's a feature like this already available in @
sonnb XenGallery. His Gallery addon is the best example on Xenforo.com on how privacy should be handled. When my members blog on other sites like Tumblr or even Facebook they have to deal with spam and stalkers far more than they would have to on a forum. Reporting and blocking people on other social networking and blogging sites is sometimes useless because the stalkers and spammers can easily make a new account. This is why some would rather blog on my invite-only forum because they won't have to deal with spam and stalkers.
Blogging sites like Tumblr and even blogging on Facebook is so popular that some people will overlook their own privacy for the sake of fitting in. Eventually something bad happens to them from blogging on those other sites and they ask me for help. At that point I tell them to use
QuitStalkingMe.com and send them a link to
this mashable article. One member had to create a new Facebook because a guy that was stalking her, was able to save all her pics and create fake pages of her because he was on her friend's list the whole time, except she didn't realize it because he had made his profile private and blocked her from being able to see his page and info. Issue's like those are not only on Facebook. We had
something like that happen recently on Xenforo that was recently reported by @
Daniel Hood
At least on my site, I won't have to worry much about spammers, trolls, stalkers and harassers since the site is invite-only and the only thing about private sites you have to worry about is making sure the right people are allowed to give out invitations. My site mostly consists of real people as in some of us have met in real life and some have met on cam. There are some members who have joined when the site was open registration during an experimental phase and are not verified but they are generally harmless. Whenever I do open the site to registration, noobs have slightly restricted access compared to regular membership, until they are manually promoted.
Privacy is a never-ending battle on the internet. Privacy is so important to my site I have created addons such as
Member's Only Avatars,
campaigned to get
Member Card View Permissions made and paid @
Robbo and @
xfrocks to code more privacy permissions for
XFR User Albums (I had issues with those though but thankfully @
sadikb released
XFR User Albums More and I was able to get refunds). Blogs need privacy to match the rest of the privacy settings of the site. The blog should not be the leak. Even though I have private forums, the public forums are still a privacy leak due to there not being post or thread privacy permissions on an individual basis. Hopefully one day this feature will get made in Xenforo. I have
requested one to be made and will revive that thread eventually. Please show your support in that thread if you would like a Posts and Threads to Follow Member Privacy Settings addon too.
Blog privacy should also extend to it's latest comment and latest blog widgets. There are a lot of widgets out there that do not follow the privacy permissions set for forums and/or usergroups. An example of such a widget is all the Recent Status widgets out there right now either in the Resource Manager or the archives. Hopefully one will be made soon as I've
requested one to be made. Show your support there too if you are also concerned about profile status privacy. Hopefully @
Daniel Hood will add that widget to his upcoming
XMWidgets BD Widget Framework Extension.
Privacy for blogs is important not just because of blogs, stalkers and harassers, it's also important because of big government. In light of this
Edward Snowden/NSA/PRISM stuff I'm not comfortable with any entity watching me or forcing ISPs and Hosts to hand over evidence. I have gone to the extreme of not letting my
Taigachat Pro Chatbox record archives unlike most webmasters. If anything incriminating or discriminatory or something said that could be brought up in the future to harm someone's reputation, it won't be recorded by the site's chatbox. Once they type past a certain part, there is no recovering that chat because chat is not being archived.
Some of my members left my site when it became public due to their privacy issues. Although they have left, I will continue including the best privacy options I can, not so much in hopes of getting them back, but to say to myself 'Yes I have addressed and solved every one of their problems' and so that the people I invite in the future who are very private won't have the same issues. Right now, both blogs that are out for Xenforo have privacy issues and besides the RSS issue I talked about in my previous post, Privacy is the second biggest factor in me getting another blog made.
