Earlier today a user posted their mobile number in this post Card still not working & it took a couple of hours after I flagged the post, for the moderator to it pick up.
I’m surprised that the number wasn’t automatically suppressed (automatically identified & hidden) & since it wasn’t, are there any safeguards in place for the forum at the moment?
I can post a 16 digit number 0000 0000 0000 0000 (card number) & a 9 digit number 000-000-000 (from my card) 000 (CSV). For most people it’s obvious that it’s not a good idea to post these details but even so, I think suppression should be put in place.
Also, this must be mentioned somewhere but the guidelines don’t mention that users shouldn’t post personal / account details etc. in the forum…
I’ve experimented with automated dox protection on previous forums I’ve been on, sadly it has the same problems as trying to censor words or phrases. It becomes an unwinnable game.
The best solution I ever got was automatically silently flagging suspect posts and only showing them to trusted users until they had been verified clean. Also having a good moderation team on top of their flag queue, generally reviewing every post within 15–20 minutes.
Now, this community is a bit too nice to throw down those levels of moderation but certainly, getting posts flagged and reviewed quickly is the biggest step in solving any issues.
Thanks for the feedback! Totally agree about personal information but as @RichardR says, I think that’s a game we can’t win forever. Users can flag certain topics and once enough people have, it should be automatically hidden and then one of us can look at it. Additionally, we’re pretty stretched at the moment so don’t get to spend as much time here as I’d like But we’ll have a new community manager joining at the end of August So start thinking about improvements you’d like to see
I appreciate that the automatic suppression wouldn’t be fool proof and as we’ve all seen, if someone wants to get around it, they can.
But it does remind the person making the post that the information shouldn’t be shared so it would cover innocent mistakes. Then, for anything that that gets past the automatic detection there’s the flags. But you’re then relying on a moderator picking up the post before someone who’s going to misuse the information.
I’m sure Discourse has the capability, it’s pretty common feature.
It took a couple of hours for a flagged post (because of a personal mobile number being posted) to be picked up yesterday & I’d be surprised if account details aren’t posted in the future…
& carried on the conversation in their Meta site. This is what one of the co-founders of Discourse told me
and I’m hoping that they’re on release 1.6 now?
It might be tricky for me to pick up on the update, since I don’t have access to the feed of Discourse customer’s information so hopefully, if you can keep your eyes peeled, this will be ready soon!
Feed of customer information? Discourse is all open on GitHub though!
Or just keep an eye on the releases category of meta.discourse.org if you don’t want to stare at commits and pull requests to find where it gets added.
But we’ll have a new community manager joining at the end of August 
So start thinking about improvements you’d like to see 
