There’s been a discussion over on the Site Feedback board about making the non-music forums private
“Private” means people can only read them if they’re logged in and some boards could also be limited to certain user trust level but that’s another thread for another day I reckon.
The need to login should
prevent search engines surfacing content from these threads
Stop AI crawlers from “reading” or potentially with the rise of agentic AI posting (it’s how sites like 404Media stops AI crawling their editorial). We do have a lot of crawlers blocked in our robots.txt so this shouldn’t be an issue but this tech moves fast (and Peter Kyle doesn’t seem to care if the conversations about copyright and IP in music are anything to go by)
Stop US border patrol doing a deep search on someone and somehow linking them to their DiS posts
This discussion came about because a few users were frustrated that they couldn’t use Google search to find threads on music boards and the lovely @zeal fixed the bug. Hopefully it could mean we slowly find a few new users joining in the music chat.
I’m not sure if there are any unintended consequences with making the boards private so speak up below if there’s anything you forsee.
Sounds good
No! Don’t do it!
Not bovvered. Whatevs.
0voters
If there is a reason to have a public social board (would mean there could still be beefs with coaltalk), here’s a back up idea:
Make this board private and start social 2.0 public
Add more private boards and have a public social board
Nah
Either/Or/Both
0voters
Hope that all makes sense
Also have flagged this idea to @admins and @moderators and checking for any issues they forsee too.
Keep the Music and For Musicians boards public, maybe Classifieds and Entertainment, everything else private. Although I suspose if there is an AI worry maybe a new public for Musicians area?
Music Board is still the place I see the most new arrivals, so definitely good to keep that open if possible - probs one of the few good online forums left for music discussion anyway
Social would be good to keep private given what people have said about crawlers etc, people can be very open there. And don’t think we’re losing much from stopping total lurkers from seeing - new people can still make accounts if they do want to join in
definitely behind making the social board private. as others have said, music board is not (as far as i’m aware?) as open as people are on the social board - and i think we’ve developed enough of a community that it feels more like a pub chat than a public internet forum - something which we (or certainly i) can forget at times x
Probably would need a certain amount of time as a member/posts before getting access to Social? Feel like we’ve had this discussion as a group before and there was a reason why it didn’t happen.
Where did that reasoning come from btw? I didn’t see that mentioned in that thread where the fix got applied. I always thought Discourse’s search seemed robust
In my experience, closed online communities wither and die over time. Part of what I like about DiS is that new people do come along and keep the place evolving. Would that still happen if this was Private?
my thinking is that entertainment, news and politics (perhaps?) and music would remain open, as people are less inclined to be so open about who they are there. sure there’s likely to be opinion, but harder to trace who the person saying it is…
I definitely don’t think there should be a trust level barrier to the social board in general. Requiring a user to be logged in should be enough to prevent search engine and AI crawling (at least whilst CAPTCHAs work, is there one for registering / signing in?)
In terms of protecting us from ICE etc I don’t know how likely this would be to be done manually so I would have thought the same applies for this. If law enforcement want to spend actual person hours chasing down posts by an individual then I’m not sure a certain trust level is going to help idk
As far as I am aware we don’t really have a problem with malicious/troll users posting which might be the main argument for restricting social to a certain trust level.
also, as rob just said, if our posts aren’t public how are we going to showcase our searing insights and sage wisdom to the world and thus attract the best “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” required keep the forum alive?
I think it’s more likely immigration would search someone’s phone rather than figure out their username to real name - would be pretty hard to prove
I’m sure I’ll be held responsible for all of your posts tho
Looks like the crowd has spoken… there’s about 300 people on here posting regularly so I’ll wait to see if more people have a view or concerns that haven’t been aired
