Doug, I'm surprised by your response.
It's simple and easy to keep the forums private and inaccessible to search engines. There's a Robots Exclusion Protocol that has been in effect since 1994.
Search Indexing Robots and Robots.txt - SearchTools.com. Two simple lines of text in the site's robots.txt file would accomplish this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /forums
Quote:
|
It can't be a public forum, and be "insulated" from search engines.......If it's online, it can be seen, it can be searched.
|
So not only is that statement false, but given the choice to affiliate with Digg and other content aggregators, it's almost besides the point. There is at least some inconsistency in creating and encouraging a community of such intimacy AND maintaining a high level of visibility on the internet. So not only does this site fail to provide a simple and readily available curtain of privacy to the thoughts and feelings of its users, but it has chosen instead to broadcast them as widely as possible. In my view, that's wrong. There is some similarity here to broadcasting the content of AA meetings or therapy sessions on YouTube.
I wish I had known from the time I registered as a user on this site that everything I post would be public. I was certainly wrong to assume that given the nature of the site, some privacy measures would be employed.