The Haven should be accessible only by members.

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The Haven should only be accessible to members.

Topics in The Haven are about issues like depression and suicide. If someone posts such a topic that topic should not be publicly visible.

If an employer had a job interview and the prospective employer did a background check on the person and found that the person had had major depression then the employer might not hire that person. Or an employer or relative who someone posted about might read one of those topics. Or if someone didn't like another person and found that the other person had posted about being suicidal then they might use that information against them.

They can register to view the board.

It used to be members-only.

It seems logical that it should be members only and flagged / blocked so it isn't included by search engine robots. However, I'd suggest that if people want to keep a certain amount of privacy they don't use their real name as their WP username and that they don't identify themselves in their posts. That eliminates the risk of potential employers rejecting candidates but it also means that anyone with malicious intentions cannot embarrass / blackmail or otherwise make mischief.

I must admit, I have wondered why it isn't members only and wished it was, given the sort of topics one sometimes needs to post in there.

I agree - having it members-only makes sense.

Any idea why it was changed?
Might making it members-only make it unsearchable even for members? Since WP now uses a custom Google search instead of a built-in search?

To avoid this problem I use this account with almost no precise information. But still, it is annoying it is not closed.

I see hundreds of new 'members' every month register and yet never make a post, so I know a 'member' is a fluid designation. If you mean it to be non searchable from Google, then I agree with that, as well.

Lau? How do we do this?

Merle

I'm not convinced that The Haven was ever members only. I strongly doubt that Alex would ever have changed a forum from members only to public, without (at least) deleting every thread from it - as to do so would be a betrayal of trust.

So far as changing any forum to members only... that would be easy. However, as I see it, it would also be irreversible. I.e. doing such a thing needs to be a clear and well considered action - not a spur-of-the-moment decision.

I think it would be fairly easy to request search engines not to scan The Haven, as that's what "robots.txt" is for. At present, that file seems a little out of date, to me. However, I suspect Alex might be the one to make any decision about changing it.

Finally, I personally don't see any particular reason why The Haven should be members only, any more than most of the the forums. The Members Only Discussion is what it says it is - members only. I'd even suggest that some members' decision to join was based on what they could see in The Haven.

No, it was members' only at one point, because it used to be the way I knew whether or not I was logged in; if I wasn't, The Haven wouldn't show up at all. I don't know when it changed, as I haven't been logged out in over a year, but it definitely was members' only when I joined.

Unless there is a pattern in the URLs for topics in The Haven, it would probably be easier to add some code to the overall_header.tpl file in the phpbb theme used for this site that would add a <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> to pages if the current page is The Haven or one of the topics therein. Google could still see the pages, but wouldn't index them or any links in them.

That solution would be incomplete, though. If you look at a member's profile you can see a list of each post they have made. That list includes every post that is visible to whichever user is viewing the list. If The Haven is visible, Google will still index each post made in that forum when it indexes each user's list of posts made.

Also excluding those pages using robots.txt would be sufficient to prevent Google from indexing each post.

Usernames will still be visible to Google, though, so if someone knows another person's username, they would be able to search Google for said username, find this site and readily view all of a user's posts, even those made in The Haven, whereas if The Haven were hidden then posts made within The Haven would be excluded from those lists when the user viewing the lists wasn't logged in.

Wow, I had no idea it was visible to non-members.

I think it should be only seen in members only since a lot of that stuff is vulnerable and personal.

There is one single forum labelled "Members Only Discussion".

Why should there be any confusion over the fact that every other forum is open to the public?

(With the obvious exception of the age-limited "Adult Autism Issues" - although I suppose the site could force a guest to answer the question "Are you over 17?" every time they attempted to view a post there.)

I was about to suggest maybe doing something like the "You can't post a URL until you make five posts" to stop people from signing up just to read the forum without contributing at all, but it might not be such a good idea to block someone who may have just signed up to ask for advice from The Haven.

I think making it not-searchable is a very good idea. TallyMan did raise a good point that members can limit the amount of potentially identifiable information contained in their posts, but it seems to me that a lot of members posting in The Haven won't even think about that due to the distress they could be under. This could possibly lead to a compounding of the issues they are facing, as they now worry about the problems facing them and who can see those personal problems. The Haven should be a place where someone can feel safe (as safe as possible on the Internet, at least) confiding in the members without bearing their soul to billions of people.

There should be an option, like the "Disable BBCode in this post", "Disable Smilies in this post", "Attach signature", and "Notify me when a reply is posted" options, that allows you to hide a specific post from anyone who's not logged in and have it be read by members only.