There are a lot of round robins in regional areas of the forum. They should all be 
then.
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I am 100% in favor of more privacy in and for the forum.
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For the record… I have asked for this privacy issue to be looked into further.
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Has anyone from the Postcrossing team responded to the concern (which I share)?
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Yes… it is being looked into.
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In the meantime I found this old thread, where Paulo wrote about this:
Do you have additional information or can one of the mods comment on this including a timeline? It’s quite a concern and I think there should be transparency about the process.
I thought it was out in the open in short intro course of the forum which areas are visible to non-logged people (means indexed by search engines) and which are private 
I always kept in mind whether I’m in the open part or not.
Probably language communities might better be made private (it will also lead to less users with ‘Regular’ status, I reckon)
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My question is more directed to the fact that content of this forum (both posts and comments) is being indexed by Google and appearing in google searches, which as far as i can remember didn’t happened in the old version of the forum.
This is not a case of the existence of open and closed parts in this community (as they always existed but used to be more restricted) but the fact that our content, instead of being contained in the forums, is being passed and appearing in outsider and visible platforms while associated with our usernames.
Something that i thought would share with this closed community only, it’s now a google search item. I didn’t enjoy that!
Also, i saw that there are ways to prevent google to index websites so would like to know if that could be an option here and why that wasn’t used before.
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I see. Thank you for clarifying, and sorry for bringing the conversation a bit out of the main topic.
Yes, I believe options to turn off the indexing exist. At least it does when building websites in Wordpress (and probably other builder tools), and I would think there is such option for forums too.
I don’t… but as of now, I think I was the only person to notify them. It would help if others do as well.
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I third this. Quickly.
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Have you received any replies or updates on this?
Hey everyone!
Just a quick note to let you know we’re aware of this topic, but do not have the time to properly address it at the moment. The change being proposed here is not a simple one (as it changes the way things have worked for 18 years), and so I hope you understand it will require time and discussion to go over its ramifications.
We’ll put some thought into it, and come back to this in 2024.
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Search engine spiders crawl all over the internet
Wow, thanks for letting us know!
Beforehand, I apologize for the delay of getting back to this. We had hoped to have replied to this much earlier, but in between getting sick and the several things we need to juggle at any time, only now we get the chance to properly address it.
Heads up: this is a long-ish reply, so grab a cup of your favourite beverage! 
There are some good points to this topic, but also many things that are not true which are muddling the discussion and I think it’s important to clarify first.
The Postcrossing forum (both old and the current one) has always been public for the 18 years we had a forum. Also, there were no major changes to the visibility of the forum, including when we moved to this forum. During the big migration process to the new forum, we aimed to minimize changes, so we mirrored the visibility settings too. Having said this, with the new forum login integration, what’s the visibility of the forum content is less obvious than it was with the old forum and this is something I’ll come back to later.
While the forum has always been public since its early days, there are some small exceptions to this that I must mention. Starting already on the old forum, and if memory doesn’t fail me, there were a couple of sections that were visible only to members:
- Off-topic section (now Everything else): because we didn’t want potential new members to be joining the forum (or Postcrossing) based on those randoms topics which aren’t core to what a Postcrossing is about;
- non-RAS section (now Spread the Joy! (non-RAS)): because this particular section was known for sometimes having addresses posted due to the nature of that activity and we wanted to limit access to that.
Moreover, some time after the migration to the new forum, we added a couple more exceptions which was to make the Games and Activities and Trades, requests and offers visible only to TL1. That was not to “hide from Google”, because in fact even new members can’t see them until they explored and participated on the forum for a while (to reach TL1). The reasoning for that change was that we wanted people to join the forum because of Postcrossing, and not necessarily because of the swaps and other games which aren’t official Postcrossing activities.
Aside from these few exceptions, the rest (which is the majority) of the forum content was always public for the last 18 years.
Having clarified these points, I’d like to explain why 18 years ago we opted to keep the forum public (which is the default for internet forums) and also why we are not going to make significant changes to this at this point, although for slightly different reasons.
Back in 2005, Postcrossing didn’t have hundreds of thousands of users in 200+ different countries. We were only getting started in this crazy journey and we considered ourselves lucky if anyone had somehow made their way to the website for the first time. However, joining a website that (at the time) nobody had heard before and where you are asked to provide your address as part of signup was… unusual. In those cases, it was very helpful to be able to browse the forum before signing up to better understand that this crazy idea of a project is for real and there was (and there is!) a large community of people who truly love to exchange mail — it’s not just some sort of random internet scam. So, having the content of the forum visible to any person interested in Postcrossing was simply the obvious choice, as it helped people trust it and join the project. That is still true today, although to a lesser degree, as now one can also check Wikipedia and other websites to learn about Postcrossing.
However, these days there’s another associated reason which is no less important. That is the fact that the forum content is a significant part of how the project is found and gets new members today.
Postcrossing is a project offered for free, so it does not have a budget to advertise itself like other websites may be able to do. Besides the word of mouth done by the community itself, a large portion of new members are people who simply stumble on Postcrossing when searching for some tangent topic, be it about postcards, stamps, penfriends, favourite washi tape, postage costs, etc. Postcrossing gets a lot of visits from those searches and a portion of those actually join — that’s a big part of how the project gets new members. Obviously, the content on the forum is crucial here, and if were we to hide away from search engines, it would have consequences for the project’s future.
After this topic was opened, we have revisited the numbers on this by looking at the major sources of new visits to the website/forum. While it’s hard to estimate exact numbers, it remains that a large portion of how Postcrossing is found by new members is through these random tangencial searches that lead people to the forum (and/or main website). Granted, you are all members already and don’t need to worry about that any more… but it’s important for the project that it continues to be found and that new members join on a daily basis so that Postcrossing will still be here in years to come. The visibility of the content on the forum is an important part of that. Without having a significant new way to replace that source of new members, we can’t consider to change the (default) forum visibility.
With this, we are not indifferent to the points brought up regarding privacy, which I can personally relate to, to a certain extent. And we can also see some advantages in having a “closed” forum. I should however point out a few things:
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Changing forum visibility does not actually prevent one’s username from coming up on Google searches: usernames appear in many places in Postcrossing’s main website, from rankings, to blog and postcard comments and even the postcard pages themselves which are public and mention the sender and receiver in them. In other words, changing the visibility to the forum content does not prevent a username from potentially showing up in a google search as it’s visible in multiple places in Postcrossing’s website.
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Postcrossing does not require people to identify in the project with their real name but with a username, and we even don’t have profile photos, but avatars. This is not accidental: one is free to use whatever username (and avatar) they wish and feel comfortable using on the internet: obviously one can choose to use a more revealing e.g. @AnnSmith1980 as their username if they want, or something completely generic and that is not used anywhere else.
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A forum behind login can provide a fake sense of privacy. Please keep in mind that Postcrossing accounts are free, so anyone can join and still view everything that would not be visible without an account. Assuming that content is only visible to members can provide a false sense of privacy, because anyone can be a member.
Having said all this, what now?
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We are not changing the visibility of the forum content at this point as that would have a significantly negative impact for the future of the project.
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However, we can see that with the new forum login integration, the fact that the forum is public is not as obvious as it used to be on the old forum. The Forum Guidelines do start by saying to treat it as public park, but that’s not clear enough. Hence, we’ll be adding a notice to the page where members join the forum (and accept the Forum Guidelines) to make it more clear that the forum content is primarily public.
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Some of you mention RRs as an exception. The Round Robins are already only visible to TL1 members and there’s no way to hide just RRs when they are done within the Language & Geographical Communities categories, without applying the restriction to the whole category, which we are not keen on doing (as RRs is not core to what that category is meant for). There’s no particularly sensitive data posted (publicly) on the normal course of a RR that justifies the need for that exception nor to extend it to whole other categories because of it.
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Lastly, I’m moving this topic from Bugs to Suggestions as this is not a bug.
To wrap up, we understand the reasoning for the requests made here, but we also can’t be indifferent to the consequences it would have for the project if we were to change this. I believe the forum team does a good job in preventing personal data (like addresses) from being indadvertedly posted on the forum, and I think the kind of content and discussions we have on this forum are not particularly sensitive. Hiding it from search engines would not address the fact that anyone can create an account at any time and read the forum content anyway. Ultimately, as with anything else one does online, one should only post what they feel comfortable publishing on the internet for others to see.
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@paulo
Maybe it’s just me… And that’s fine… But I find the regional RR privacy issue disheartening. If RRs listed under games and activities are hidden from Google, the regional ones should be too. I guess I don’t understand why there isn’t a regional section under games and activities where those RRs can be moved to. That way the regional sections are still visible to non-members but the round robins are not. I don’t think anyone can say personal information isn’t mentioned in the regional RRs unless they have read every single post. I’ve seen many people mention many personal details in their posts, especially when they’re communicating with the same group of people on a monthly basis. That being said, I’m not advocating to make the whole forum private or even the regional sections private. I’m only advocating to have ALL RRs moved to the games and activity section where they are not visible to non-members.
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