[bofe954]

I am looking at applying for new jobs soon and work in a relatively anti-gun field. I have been messing around googling my name and trying to see what kinds of things possible employers can find out about.

One thing that pops up is my Benos user profile, which then provides the user name I use on a bunch of other forums. I'd rather this be more anonymous. I changed my name (which is a bummer because I'd like to use the classifieds). It still comes up. Anyway I was wondering if it would, if the user profiles were available by login only.

[3quartertime]

bofe954, on Jul 1 2009, 10:12 AM, said:

I am looking at applying for new jobs soon and work in a relatively anti-gun field. I have been messing around googling my name and trying to see what kinds of things possible employers can find out about.

One thing that pops up is my Benos user profile, which then provides the user name I use on a bunch of other forums. I'd rather this be more anonymous. I changed my name (which is a bummer because I'd like to use the classifieds). It still comes up. Anyway I was wondering if it would, if the user profiles were available by login only.

BE will have to look into your request. I know he reads these so give it a few I'm sure he's looking into it.


As as far as changing your user name and losing your classified access. We can adjust post count numbers so if you or any member needs to change to a new account just let us know. If you need to change your user name we can do that also...

[chefcs5]

yes that could be changed but the problem there is he cant just block that part. So you wouldnt find anything at all when you googled. at this time with ipb its all or nothing. I can see that it would be much worse to block the search engines than to let them in as they do now. See right now basic search engines like google, yahoo, ask and other actually do "log in" or basically for all intents and purposes we will say they do because they collect all information that you would as a standard logged in member.

hope this helps

[tekno]

chefcs5, on Jul 2 2009, 07:45 AM, said:

yes that could be changed but the problem there is he cant just block that part.

Are you sure? I frequent other forums where the user profiles only are viewable if you are logged in (and therefore not indexed) , but the content of the forum is open and indexed by the search engines.

[bofe954]

Quote

As as far as changing your user name and losing your classified access. We can adjust post count numbers so if you or any member needs to change to a new account just let us know. If you need to change your user name we can do that also...

That would sort of help my problem and I appreciate the gesture. The real issue is now I don't really want my real name in my account profile, and having it there is required of the classifieds.

I don't think the classifieds are google-able. I know the user profiles aren't really a forum, but there seems to be more than one level of viewing.

[chefcs5]

tekno, on Jul 2 2009, 01:04 AM, said:

chefcs5, on Jul 2 2009, 07:45 AM, said:

yes that could be changed but the problem there is he cant just block that part.

Are you sure? I frequent other forums where the user profiles only are viewable if you are logged in (and therefore not indexed) , but the content of the forum is open and indexed by the search engines.

well if the forum is a diffrent software such as VB or phpbb or other it may be diffrent also for another forum you go to just google your user name you will end up having to sift through a ton of crap but it will end up with a link to your profile at some point if it is ipb software. Now the main reason is is that ipb doesnt use tags or word clouds for the search engines it basically just allows search engines on the board and to index all info that would be gatherd by any regular member. This can be disabled but then they would have no access and index nothing.

[FullRace]

I just did a search via google for my name. Only three entries came up and were shooting related.

One click on the google entry for my profile entry on Benos and you are taken to my profile page within the forum.

This really needs to be blocked. World access to our profiles is not cool.

[BritinUSA]

I think there's a way for the ADMIN to change it so it will deny access to guests and certain member groups and only allow it to others.

Other forums that I'm a member of have this function

[chefcs5]

there is a way to do so. yes but it will greatly limit the search features and indexing of sites like google. making searching less effetive and sendign less traffic here. but yes it is possible.

[Xfactor]

FullRace, on Jul 2 2009, 09:24 AM, said:

One click on the google entry for my profile entry on Benos and you are taken to my profile page within the forum.
This really needs to be blocked. World access to our profiles is not cool.

+1

[JThompson]

Ya, you don't even have to have an account to view the profiles... there should be ways to prevent that. I'm not sure you can do it short of turning off read access to everyone without an account. I may be wrong as I haven't used IPB for some time.

[chefcs5]

JThompson, on Jul 2 2009, 10:42 AM, said:

Ya, you don't even have to have an account to view the profiles... there should be ways to prevent that. I'm not sure you can do it short of turning off read access to everyone without an account. I may be wrong as I haven't used IPB for some time.

yes that is how you would do it Jim and you could also throw bots intot that category and not let them have access

[benos]

I don't know if there is anything that can be done, other than to just turn off indexing. Which I definitely don't want to do.

So I submitted a ticket to IP - and gave them the link to this thread.

I'll be out till Monday, so I'll check back then.
be

[benos]

IP came through with a solution. I set the member group "Guests" to not be able to view member profiles, and then set Google to be treated as a Guest.

I can't say how that change will affect existing indexed profiles, but it should prevent any members profiles from being indexed by Google in the future.
be

[whatmeworry]

Thanks for the effort Brian. We shall see what we shall see.
CYa,
Pat

[benos]

whatmeworry, on Jul 6 2009, 04:07 PM, said:

Thanks for the effort Brian. We shall see what we shall see.
CYa,
Pat

Yes.

I googled "benos" and my profile came up on the 2nd page. So hopefully at some point, non-now-indexible profiles will drop out of google's results.

I'll make a note in my calendar program to try it again in a month.
be

[Singlestack]

My profile came up on about page 3 as well.

[DonT]

When I type my real name into Google my profile comes up page #1 and 5th or 6th down.
I discovered this a few months ago when someone from my past found me (no, I wasn't lost) and joined this forum just so they could PM me. Not a big deal this time but when I think about all the personal info that is right there for anyone to see, name, b-day, addresses. That's just a little more than I care to display to the world. I've never been hit with identity theft yet but it does concern me.

So my profile page on google is cached (it's a photo of my profile page taken on May 10, 2009). I don't know if or when it ever goes away. For now I have removed my name and info from my profile until I can think about this some more.

This is from google;
Google takes a snapshot of each page examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the "Cached" link, you will see the web page as it looked when we indexed it. The cached content is the content Google uses to judge whether this page is a relevant match for your query.

When the cached page is displayed, it will have a header at the top which serves as a reminder that this is not necessarily the most recent version of the page. Terms that match your query are highlighted on the cached version to make it easier for you to see why your page is relevant.

The "Cached" link will be missing for sites that have not been indexed, as well as for sites whose owners have requested we not cache their content.

[chefcs5]

benos, on Jul 6 2009, 07:47 PM, said:

whatmeworry, on Jul 6 2009, 04:07 PM, said:

Thanks for the effort Brian. We shall see what we shall see.
CYa,
Pat

Yes.

I googled "benos" and my profile came up on the 2nd page. So hopefully at some point, non-now-indexible profiles will drop out of google's results.

I'll make a note in my calendar program to try it again in a month.
be

you will need to add all bots that you allow to this group such as yahoo, ask, and so forth. also you will need to ask google not to cache your pages as mentioned above or any pages already scanned will continue to be there, it will just move down the list as more things are scanned in.

[bofe954]

Thanks for what's been done, and whatever else gets done...

[benos]

benos, on Jul 6 2009, 03:49 PM, said:

IP came through with a solution. I set the member group "Guests" to not be able to view member profiles, and then set Google to be treated as a Guest.

I can't say how that change will affect existing indexed profiles, but it should prevent any members profiles from being indexed by Google in the future.
be

The above should read as, instead of "Google," "all search engine spiders."
be

[ima45dv8]

When I just did a search on my real name on Google and Yahoo, nothing related to this forum came up, at least in the first 5 pages of results. Fortunately there's some internet busybodies with the same name that get all the hits.

When I searched for "ima45dv8", the first hit was my member profile here. It can't be 'read' by clicking the link unless you are logged in, but the cached results show all my data, as does the verbiage in the uncached link's description field.

[benos]

I finally found what's below after clicking google forever.

So I'm wondering if blocking the caching of any forum page is a good idea for the forum in general, as no forum page is ever "static."
be

Quote

Cached pagesPrint
Google automatically takes a "snapshot" of each page it crawls and archives it. This "cached" version allows a webpage to be retrieved for your end users if the original page is ever unavailable (due to temporary failure of the page's web server). The cached page appears to users exactly as it looked when Google last crawled it, and we display a message at the top of the page to indicate that it's a cached version. Users can access the cached version by choosing the "Cached" link on the search results page.

Before you begin, you must do one of the following:

To update the cached version of a page, change the content of the page. The next time Google crawls the page, we'll update the cached version.
To removed cached versions of a page from Google's index and prevent Google from caching the page in the future, you must add a noarchive meta tag to that page. The next time we crawl that site, we'll see the tag and remove the page.
To prevent all search engines from showing a "Cached" link for your site, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page:

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">
To prevent only Google from displaying one, use the following tag:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">
Once this is complete, you can use the URL removal tool in Webmaster Tools to request expedited removal of the cached content for a minimum of six months. To verify that your cached page no longer appears, do a Google search for cache:[your URL].

[benos]

ima45dv8, on Jul 7 2009, 04:11 PM, said:

When I searched for "ima45dv8", the first hit was my member profile here. It can't be 'read' by clicking the link unless you are logged in...

Well crap - that's the "answer." I just logged out, googled benos, and when I clicked google's result for my profile, I couldn't see anything w/o logging in. So only our forum members can see our profiles from a google search.
be

[BritinUSA]

I'm guessing that by removing the cached versions then Google searches won't pick up anything from the forums as they use the caches to build the search database. That could result in fewer new members joining as they will be less visibility for the forums, which would be a bad thing.

From what they say it looks like you can stop the individual pages from being cached, like the Profile pages and perhaps the classifieds forums and perhaps some of the non-shooting related stuff. Would that be a better solution ? Assuming it's possible, they have something similar on another forum that I'm a member of where the user can specify if they want their posts visible to non-members or not.... No idea how that works though