I understand your concern, but we cannot have it both ways. If we write extensively in a blog then we essentially put our lives out there. Those that know us can identify us simply because we are all such individuals. And in truth, we don't blog so that nobody can read our blog. If we wanted to do that we would just keep a journal. We blog because our writing achieves a goal. And I hope you realize that there are many people out there who read what you write and they get a great deal of value from it. If you stop blogging and writing on TuD it would be a great loss to the community and me personally.
You can maintain a reasonable level of privacy while still blogging and writing. People that know you may be able to make the connection but the spammer and scammers can't. In the end that is what really matters.
Yeah... I kind of feel the same way... I don't mind people here reading what I have written but random people on the web or people from other parts of my life I don't want to share these things with is another story is another thing. I don't have a formal blog and I don't want it shared really. But I guess you can find out a lot from an email or just searching a topic too maybe. Some sites such as pinterest do have search privacy as a choice.
Hmm... I was wondering about this lately because every time I come here and I click on something like a topic, not an ad, adds for various diabetes recipes/products open up on new pages- it is very annoying. My browsers were hijacked and I thought doing an uninstall had fixed it but apparently this is something else here and elsewhere.
Don't worry, no plans to stop blogging! I just might stop writing posts with information that I really don't want friends or family coming across here and write them to a private journal instead. It was probably just a fluke that google happened to spit out this particular post for my friend, and 95% of the stuff I write here is stuff I wouldn't care if anyone found, but there are some things I write that I don't want friends and family reading and worrying about, so that stuff I should probably keep in a private journal (which I do keep anyway).
I'd still post blog posts and have no plans to shut down my Blogger blog - I've actually done a lot of thinking since started that blog on how I'd feel if it was "found" by someone; I just hadn't thought about it with TuD before.
Showing up high in google search results is overall a good thing for TuDiabetes. Shows it to be a very popular website and one that folks folks find useful to link to a lot.
I know many of us try to give a mix of our personal experiences along with links to reputable scientific journals and how they relate to our concerns and lives.
I understand what you are saying Jen. This is our diabetes FAMILY and we feel like we can say certain things that don't concern other parts of our lives. I don't know if there is a solution or not but it is a shame that this confidence in our diabetes family could be jeopardized! I like seeing people's pictures. It helps to put in context their remarks or worries.
Hope someone has some ideas....maybe it's up to each person to define the risk of their involvement
I agree, I like seeing people's photos - it's one of the things that makes this site different from others. I think a great solution would simply be to have an optional box that could be checked to make posts viewable only to members who are logged into the site. I wouldn't always use such a checkbox, but it would be useful for some posts, so there would still be plenty for Google to pick up (to attract people to the site and such), but it would be a nice option to have.
I have mixed feelings about the suggestion to require a log-in to view posts. There is another site that I would like to view posts on but can't without joining. Here, I used to be able to stay logged in for days, as long as my computer was on sleep and not turned off. Now, I have to log in frequently and it is a bit irritating really. This happens every time I close the TuD tab and then open it again a couple hours later, without "sleeping" the computer.
But, I do like to be able to view the posts without logging in if reading is all I want to do. If I don't post, it doesn't matter if I am not logged in. That is also how new members find the place and scan posts to see if they want to join. If they had to join to see posts, many would be like me and refuse to take that step (as with that other site I mentioned).
On the other hand, I do think there should be an option on our profile to check for "OK to google or NOT OK to google." Even though nothing is private online, that does not mean we have to make it easy for a neighbor or a stranger to check everything we post. If this site is here to offer suggestions and help then that means that a fair amount of personal info about a problem must be posted in order to receive appropriate suggestions and guidance. Info about the situation, not your address, etc. My 2 cents.
I think Jen's posts here are googled because you do post a fair amount about vision impairment and I have seen you use the word Braille in posts also. It is all useful to this site as there are plenty of vision impaired people w diabetes. But it does up the frequency of those search terms. Again, it would be nice if we could choose whether posts could be googled or not.
