WARNING! Disclosure of personal information.

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TallyMan
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Joined: 30 Mar 2008
Gender: Male
Posts: 40,061

26 Jul 2011, 10:27 am

Please be aware that accounts cannot be deleted; so take care what personal information you post. It may be linked back to you in real life and come back to haunt you in the future.

The important thing when posting on any internet forum is not to use your real name anywhere or disclose anything that can be linked directly back to your real life. It is easy to find posts of members here by doing a Google search. There is no such thing as privacy on the internet.

Click here for more information

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Your email address
A few new members are changing the email option in their profile from No to Yes:
Always show my Email Address: Yes
This means your email address will be visible to everyone on the internet and your inbox will fill up with spam! Is this what you really want? If not, leave it set to No.



Last edited by TallyMan on 24 Jul 2012, 12:49 am, edited 2 times in total.

Dox47
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Location: Seattle-ish

27 Sep 2011, 4:47 pm

A few additional pointers for prospective new members when creating an account:

Create a user name unique to this forum. Even if you don't use your real name, if you use the same name across multiple forums and sites it allows someone to track you quite easily, possibly back to your true identity or other info you wouldn't want people here to know, or it can lead people from your day to day life here.
The best user names for anonymity are pop culture references, other famous names, and common words because they're very hard to track using simple search tools. It might feel lame using the name of a character from a tv show or movie rather than making up your own, but it's much safer long-term because the commonness of the name makes it google-proof.

Similar advice when choosing an avatar, the safest choice is a common or pop-culture image, or one of the stock ones provided by the site. Image search software is rapidly advancing, and even if you're careful about not linking your WP account to your Facebook or other social media, if you have the same pictures on both sites they can be easily linked with tools like Tineye.
If you really want to use your own image, just make sure you don't use the same one anywhere else on the web that connects to things you wouldn't want people here to see, e.g. don't use the same picture you use on your dating profile unless you're comfortable with people from here reading that profile.

Also, be careful even when posting personal photos in threads if those same photos are on your social media profiles, the same Tineye search can easily lead a predatory poster right to your true identity that way even if you're otherwise careful.

Another thing is that if you're going to have a public e-mail address, make sure it's not the same one you registered your other social media sites with, it's an obvious starting point for anyone trying to run down your information.


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“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
-- Robert Anton Wilson