The "Help me find Sean mccusker" topic in Classifieds has already been taken care of - I texted him & got a reply that contact has already been made, and then jej posted his email address which I think is not cool.

I had the Litter Box created for things that we aren't 100% sure should be deleted. I unequivocally delete duplicate posts and duplicate threads, but when I come up with something like that I put it in the Litter Box. If the originator or some other member of the thread wants it restored it can easily be done.

I don't see why not. When people want their sales posts deleted, I usually don't. The post already says SOLD or similar, so it's nice to have a record of things. Thoughts?

Doug's concern really didn't concern sold items. A member asked for contact information about another member related to a buy/sell (twice: once within a topic and once as a separate topic). In the older topic somebody responded with the contact information, which he gleaned from the profile information. I have no problem revealing public knowledge, but if that information was private it really is overstepping bounds. If somebody asks me for contact information for somebody I know, I'll usually contact the target and tell them to get in touch with the requestor.

From a technical stadpoint, you won't cause any damage by deleting a topic other than the topic will then be gone permanently. Well, I can recover from backup, but it isn't a fun process. If you have doubt, do as Bruce mentioned because that will prevent anyone from seeing it publicly.

Technically what occurred is doxing; which is when information is revealed about someone's identity that is intended to be private. The point of the posting rules is that it largely prevents bots from being able to see that info; if you make a post that has it then bots can see that email publicly. It isn't a huge deal for the most part but we don't explicitly have anything in the TOS that deals with such a practice as far as I recall. It would probably be worth adding to the TOS.

[quote="BGuttman"]Doug's concern really didn't concern sold items. A member asked for contact information about another member related to a buy/sell (twice: once within a topic and once as a separate topic). In the older topic somebody responded with the contact information, which he gleaned from the profile information. I have no problem revealing public knowledge, but if that information was private it really is overstepping bounds. If somebody asks me for contact information for somebody I know, I'll usually contact the target and tell them to get in touch with the requestor.[/quote]

I know that - I was making another (separate) point since we're talking about deleting topics. I guess I was either augmenting the topic or going off-topic, depending upon your viewpoint.