Members list? | Site suggestions | Discussion forum

Peter said

I had purposely removed it long ago. I forget the exact reasoning, but my guess it was deemed unnecessary and a potential privacy issue (not that you couldn't go through all the posts and view each person's profile). Is there a use case for it?

I think I might remember that actually.

However, the two reasons I can think of on the spot include:
* (1) Trying to contact a member by their "member name" that you remember via Private Message, if they allow it, of course, and they haven't posted in awhile so you can't find a recent post on which to use the PM button; and, perhaps more importantly,
* (2) Periodically sorting the "members" list by "total posts" or "total threads in which involved" by "ascending" or "descending" order in order to see who has posted the highest or lowest number of posts (admittedly, for curiosity's sake )

As for a privacy issue, I think most people either use "anonymous"-type member names or can choose whether to accept or reject private messages by PM or private e-mail message form.

Cheers,
Doug

Edit: Plus, like was said above, the "members" list can be restricted to "registered members"-ranked members (or higher, i.e. moderators or administrators, obviously).

Rick said

Don't really see the need for a list of members unless you are doing some kind of data mining. I hope I respect others privacy and would expect the same from members I have PM'd. I am sure there are members here that utilize this forum but have no need or desire to post anything or very little. As a side note, kind of perplexed as to why there was so much distress over me posting the probable alias of an insignificant ING minion that I quoted in a post, with no foreseeable hope of him ever being contacted personally , but we can post the names, phone numbers and emails of every financial institutions' president, and now want a list of this forums members.

Rick, I didn't agree with, I believe, kanaka's post of certain employees of financial institutions and I fully explained my reasons why to kanaka in a reply to that thread.

That said, there's absolutely no privacy issue as most people are smart now and don't post their last names or street addresses in online forum profiles. A typical member's public information contains their username, possibly their age (not date of birth) if they choose to disclose it, a quasi-funky signature line such as a joke or a quotation and maybe a first name. And, it's only disclosed to registered forum members, guests have no access which, consequently, no search engine would either (unless Peter's created a special account for the Googlebot, which I highly doubt). And, I'd hardly call "seeing who the most frequent or least frequent poster is" data mining.

There seems to be a pretty overwhelming consensus to making the "members" directory, which is what it is and I'd also add e-mail addresses are not revealed to anyone but Peter (as Admin), in support of this.

Cheers,
Doug

kanaka said

Doug, not sure what post you are talking about BUT I see NO need for a list.

kanaka, I was referring to Rick's post about about someone having concerns over posting bank employees phone numbers and I believed that was you that posted it so I specified to Rick that I disagreed with that.

Also, in this thread, you stated twice you support making "Members" list available to "registered members" and see no privacy issue given the numerous protections in place and cited your timeshare owners association forum as an example.

Rick, there's no "data mining" here for two reasons: (1) there's no way to bulk export the data and (2) our real names, e-mail addresses, dates of birth aren't publicly available (unless a person chooses to enter that optional information and make it available to the public!) nor is anything other than a person's total posts, their screen name/username and a PM link (if available) shown in the actual "list".

These concerns are way overblown and the vast majority of web-based forums allow registered members to access some sort of "Members" list.

Cheers,
Doug