After this topic, I'm tempted to go back and delete most everything I've said on this forum as well.
Friendly reminder to everyone: anything and everything you post here can be picked up by web crawlers (e.g. spiders) and archived permanently. Sites like the
Wayback Machine are public repositories designed to archive as much of the public web as possible. I mentioned once before that I was able to find messages there that had been deleted by a user here.
Bottom line, and this is what I tell my kids: once you post something online or message/email it, you've lost control of it. Don't post, email, or message
anything that you wouldn't want to see published on the front page of the newspaper.
This is a public forum. The small community of active members here may make it seem intimate or make it seem like it's reasonable to post personal information and request that others not refer to it or re-post it. Neither of these ideas is true. And even if people here agree not to refer to your old messages, there's nothing to stop any of the other of billions of web users from doing that. If you don't like the idea of someone going back through your old messages, don't post them to begin with.
It's honestly a bit surprising to me to see adults who don't seem to fully understand the idea that everything posted online is public, for the whole world to see and refer to. And maybe repost. My DH and I emphasize this point repeatedly with our kids. The idea needs to be second nature if they're going to avoid being taken advantage of.
