forty_two Posted June 14, 2013 Report Share Posted June 14, 2013 (edited) Looking from the forum homepage it appears [snipped - commented on a user where a birthday appeared in the calendar]. That's well and great, though it's not something I would put as public. What's more concerning to me is that [they] has been fairly specific in [their] profile information , e.g. [snipped - details on their forum profile]. I realise that people may actually want this information known about themselves, but it seems wrong to me to make it so obvious to the general population. A lot of the population of these servers are children, and may not realise it's best practise to not provide personal information, or simply not consider potential issues. [Snipped] may be a bit of an extreme example but other people are sure to have the same sort of stuff on their profiles. Personally I think the best solution would be to both not display birthdays and to show a nice little message on the profile update page (something about how public information is public). This would allow people to still put personal information on their profiles if really desired, hopefully reduce the amount thereof, and not draw as much attention to the specific profiles which are likely to contain such info (as they've already put at least their birthday in...) Edited September 17, 2013 by Barlimore Removed reference to a specific person. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Former Staff Posted June 14, 2013 Report Share Posted June 14, 2013 Given the large number of minors within the community, it is not our duty to babysit them, however we have a responsibility to ensure that they aren't sharing personal details, or at least make them aware of the consequences. We could go a step further with the information upon the profile page and have a short post about sharing personal details and their consequences in a public area too. Edit: I have just tested adding in my birthday without inputting my birth year and this works. I think people could be encouraged to avoid adding in their birth year and still allow people to revel in their celebrations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xXNjordXx Posted June 14, 2013 Report Share Posted June 14, 2013 Your concerns are good, but as far as i know entering your birthdate into your Profile is optional. So if you dont enter it you wont get a Highlight from the forum, honestly i dont think we need to worry about it too much, but still we should make sure the users understand that sharing too much information is never a good thing. Also id actually like barlis idea of showing the consequentses of sharing too much information Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
uni0 Posted June 14, 2013 Report Share Posted June 14, 2013 I'd be in favor of disabling the notifications for personal/security reasons. I was surprised the first time i saw birthday notifications myself. One issue I see is there isn't a disclaimer about birthday info being used for public notifications when creating an acc. I don't recall any of the forum/social places I'm familiar with sharing that kind of info like that. Even the often despised Facebook has conservative settings for that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Former Staff Posted September 17, 2013 Report Share Posted September 17, 2013 Moving to the archives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts