I would not allow any form of private messaging outside of private messages directly to the admin.
You have a point, but we don’t have a plan to limit VHTV Community to communicate with each other privately.
I would not allow the creation of an private clubs.
This is James writing this reply, and I personally disagree with you. Private conversations/clubs/categories is anybody’s right to do. Those should follow general VHTV Forum rules, though.
I would not allow other members to see the online status of other members.
We will take this concern into consideration. But are users allowed to see online status now? So far the only thing any user can check is “last seen” status, which gives approximate estimation on when the user was online. But we don’t see this as a security concern.
I would not assign any moderators who are not employed by vhtv. No one besides vhtv, should be able to access other members email address or IP.
Sure, you are right here. Actually, we have already made this mistake a week ago, giving non-employee user a status of “Moderator”, but we revoked it just before public launch yesterday due to the same concern. Moderator role can see user’s IP & email by default, which goes against your and our point here. Instead of that, we will be using Trust Level’s, which can be automatically earned by any user with time, given the fact this user’s efforts are recognized by community. This is not much, and doesn’t allow checking other users private data, but allows helping with forum threads and categories.
When a person signs up for this forum their user name is their email name minus the domain. You need to fix that quick for privacy protection.
This is certainly a privacy concern which we are aware of. So far user is being greeted by bot when signing up and is being sent a message where we advise to change the username if they need. We will fix this in recent future, giving the random username for newly signed-up user.
