Our robots.txt file requests that search engines exclude the forums from indexing. This decision was made, in part, back in 2004 shortly after launch due to concern by members (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=801) I suspect that Boardreader is a 'well behaved' search engine.

I thought this inexplicable limitation had been discussed before, but (oh, the irony!) I can't find the previous discussion.

My guess is the mistaken assumption behind the robots file was a worry that profile information such as email addresses would be exposed. Obviously, any information accessible to Google is accessible to any email harvester anyway -- but the main error here was failing to notice that forum profile emails are only visible to logged in members (i.e. not Google). It should go without saying that anyone incautious enough to post their personal information in the body of a forum post can't be protected by any measure (short of deleting the information).

Please can we rethink this policy? (And by "rethink", I mean "undo"). The ability to search is more valuable than a non-existent privacy concern.

Seems reasonable to me....

Before you allow all and sundry search engines in, you might like to consider adding in a warning to the Forum Rules - about publicly accessable e-mail addresses and the like... as I don't think that there's anything in there about this...

Hi everybody,
I agree ! We should use every possible ways for increasing WCG fame and notoriety (search engines represent one of the possible ways for doing this).
Providing some recommendations to the forum regarding the "risk" of e-mail publicity is a good way, even if I tend to think that the majority of people (in particular new users) do not take the time for reading such advice ! ...
Cheers,
Yves