@Forged and @Lola I moved your posts here as I have already addressed this in the top of the thread.
@Lola I think it is perfectly clear that this forum is open. When you first visited the forum, before you even created an account, you saw a huge list of topics with people discussing their problems. At that point you were just “someone” on the forum and I think it’s completely rational to deduce that any “someone” who visits the forum can read what you wrote.
@Forged How would you expect to interact with others if you don’t want them to see what you wrote?
I think there’s a lot of paranoia running around and most of it stems from people seeing the word “open” and jumping to the worst conclusions. When people say that they don’t want others to see what they wrote, they usually mean that they don’t want someone they know to see what they wrote, identify them and thus know their secret.
So I’m going to use an example here that will hopefully put things into perspective. I’m going to use your neighbor as the person, but you can replace this with anyone relevant to you.
There are currently 7.5 billion people in the world. Talking Sober gets between 500 and 1000 unique visitors per day. Let’s go worst case scenario and use 1000. The odds of any one person in the world visiting Talking Sober today is 0.000001%. Now let’s say, by some insane fluke, that your neighbor does find his way here. There are nearly 10 000 registered users on Talking Sober. The odds of him zooming into your profile and sifting through your posts to identify you are 10 000 to 1 and thus the chance goes to 0.0000000001%. Even if he manages to do all that with those insane odds, he then needs to sift through every post of yours to find something that can personally identify you. If you have not posted anything that he can use to identify you, then there is an absolute 0% chance that he will know it’s you.
There are some outlying exceptions, like if someone wants to use the same name for their business. Assuming the business becomes successful, people might go looking for it and stumble across the user’s profile here. Even then we can just change the username to something else.
Yes, the forum is open. That means anyone can find it if they are looking for it. It does not mean that the information you put on here is broadcast to everyone you know to see. They have to be looking really, really, really, really hard.
There’s a 0.0000000001% chance that someone you know will find you on here
and a 0% chance if you are careful with what you post.
This is being blown way out of proportion and it is not something you should be worried about.