hi i was just wondering how private EC is with its members pictures and information? like, for facebook, you can find random people's profile pictures there or even your own just by googling your own name with facebook as key words or something. does it work the same for EC? or is this a universal thing? thanks! i wasn't quite sure how to word this on google so i came here
http://emptyclosets.com/robots.txt Google's (and everyone else's) web caching robots are only prevented from getting data from this page: www.emptyclosets.com/forum/ecmemberinfo.php They can take your pictures and any other content you have on your individual profile pages, personal blogs etc. They need to add "/forum/members/" to the robots.txt disallow list to prevent this. You can check with this tool: W3C Link Checker It only says it doesn't have access to that one page - everything else is fair game. They will want to allow threads and posts to be put into search engines, because that's how people find this site, but the profile pages should definitely be blocked.
Unless it's been changed, they can't access your profile. You need to be logged in to access member pages, which the google robots cannot do. A simple search of Tim Empty Closets came up with none of my pictures, only pictures from threads that exist that I've posted random pics in like Glee, etc.
oh, uh, sorry but i'm not sure what you're trying to say (mostly the /forums/members/ part). so i CAN'T do anything about profile pics/information/etc. leaking out?
You're right and I did forget about that, but you can access photos and other profile content without being logged in if you have the direct URL for them, so if the search engine crawlers manage to bypass going through the actual profile page (which is definitely possible, e.g. when people post links to photos in the forums) they can still index them, because robots.txt doesn't disallow those URLs. They can leak out if the search engine web crawlers find them, because there isn't any rule in this website's robots.txt telling them that they can't index them. Although as Tim said it's unlikely (but not impossible) because you need to be logged in to view profiles, and the web indexers won't be logged in.
Hey peeps, Just to clarify, your profile information is not being accessed by bots as you must have a registered account to access such areas. Although the robot.txt doesn't explicitly block profiles from being indexed, the bots still can't do so because of the access permissions for guests not allowing the, to access profile information, and the rules we have in place not allowing members to post pictures and other particularly traceable pieces of info on the public forum. The only major flaw that sticks out in my mind is the detection of usernames that you may commonly use elsewhere, but this is something we go on about a lot, so that's something members need to take accountability for themselves to safeguard their own identity. Whilst we do intervene in some cases, for the most part we don't have the capabilities to screen everybody, so if you want to protect your identity on here then you need to ensure your username isn't obvious enough for people to find and isn't being used by yourself elsewhere as it can and will be indexed by search engines, and you'll likely find that hits for your username on google will link back to threads you've posted in, so make sure the only people searching for that username are yourselves. Martin.
Does Google scan and tag photo albums on this site? Hi folks. After using this site for a few months I now would like to put a photo of myself in an album so you can see what I look like. However since I am firmly in the closet I don’t accidentally want to out myself by being tagged by Google’s photo indexing system. Does anyone know if this is likely to happen or has had anything similar happen to them? Sale Gay Guy ---------- Post added 27th Feb 2013 at 02:00 PM ---------- Oops Sorry I have just noticed a similar post. Please ignore.
