Option to Hide Community Member List

[the_cats_mother]

Title:
Option to Hide Community Member List

Area:
Privacy

Summary:
I see a suggestion for invisibility for communities was rejected (sadly) but what about an option to hide the member list?

Description:
I'd like more privacy for members of communities with a sensitive subject matter or to avoid harrassment of members. I know you can opt not to subscribe to a community so that it doesn't show on your personal profile, but members of a community can still be identified from the profile of the community itself. Example; under another username on LJ, I belong to a small community which has attracted a very unsuitable would-be member. This person has been refused membership and is now pestering members to plead on his/her behalf, both on their journals and even by tracking them down on other sites via their profile pages. If DW would let us hide our member list, we could import to here knowing that even if our unwelcome guest found our community, s/he would'nt be able to see our (changed) usernames and start harrassing us again.

Thanks for reading. :)

Poll #9372 Option to Hide Community Member List

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 100

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
54 (54.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
23 (23.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
8 (8.0%)

(I have no opinion)
14 (14.0%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (1.0%)

Comments

[erik]

I clicked "With changes", but really it's not so much a "change" as a "clarification":

I think it is a good idea to be able to hide community membership from non-members.

I do not think it should be possible to hide the member list from the members. I assume that is not what you are contemplating. That is, I believe members of a community should always be able to see who else is a member.

[tephra]

I voted "with changes" with this in mind.

[talibusorabat]

Agreed!

[aedifica]

+1

[the_cats_mother]

No, I didn't mean to hide the list from the members. Thanks for clarifying. :)

[azurelunatic]

This makes sense to me.

[nafs]

+1

[montuos]

+1

[kyrielle]

+1

[stormy]

+1

[dancing_serpent]

Yes, this.

[kerravonsen]

+1

[faere]

+1

[susanreads]

+1

[deborah]

My "with changes" has to do with security and security. How many other ways are there to find out this information, and are they also obscured? For example, would a community with hidden membership automatically also hide it on the individual users' profiles? Would it change search results?

If the information is still something to can be found out in other ways, I would want it to be made very clear to community members, somehow, that just because the information is hidden doesn't mean it's impossible to find. That way, if people are using it to protect themselves (say, joining a BDSM community and not wanting a boss to know about it) they know the limits of the security offered by hiding the membership list.

[shameless2shoes]

I feel like the potential (or perhaps I should say reality) for harrasment is second to being unable to get a feel for the type of community you enter. There are some people - not many, but they do exist! - I would prefer to keep company with as little as humanly possible. There are other cases where I would only dare enter a community if I caught sight of a name I trust. Not neccesarily someone I would ask to vet the community for me, just the ki d of person it's usually okay to follow anywhere.
I do understand the need for privacy, but I can see this feature being over-used, to the commu ity's detriment.

[azurelunatic]

Do you think there are any situations where you would be unable to join/submit a request to join, and then upon joining/having the request approved, take a look at the membership list and remove yourself?

I suppose that for communities where one had to jump through hoops prior to joining, like filling out an application and posting it to your journal, this would be a minimum of very annoying, to go to some substantial effort and then finding that the community was unsuitable on account of its members.

[arethinn]

Do you think there are any situations where you would be unable to join/submit a request to join, and then upon joining/having the request approved, take a look at the membership list and remove yourself?

Yes. Hypothetically there could be communities I would not join specifically because a certain other person happened to be there. So if e.g. if the member list was hidden to non-members and the comm was member-locked, I wouldn't know this beforehand, and it might result in the scenario you describe (apply to join, approved, immediately leave).

[99p]

I can't see that maintainers would choose to hide their memberships unless there were good grounds, as it might impede member recruitment, so I think the scenario you describe wouldn't happen every often. Mostly, I can see the proposed option being used for small, invitation-only comms, ones dealing with sensitive matters and comms that that of the OP, who've had member harassment problems in the past.

So, on the whole, I'm like this suggestion. :)

[shameless2shoes]

If it's an invitation only comm, what's to stop you from naming your "Fan Group For Really Embarrassing Thing" something irrelevant like "We Really Like Purple Cheese" or whatever, putting down a vague description, and mention to the people you're inviting that pssst, it's our fan group.

So I see this being a tool that's more for communities where a bunch of strangers are rallying around something they don't want people to know they've joined a community for. And that, accordingly, there will be decreased membership in these sensitive communities and people who would've liked support forgo it.

[shameless2shoes]

I would assume that any such community with sensitive material enough to block the member list would also moderate membership in some form. If it were just a matter of join oops! don't like it, jump back off, that would be one thing. But my membership request could be approved, say, at 3AM. I know we're still talking about a relatively small drama window here. But let's keep in mind what kind of communities would hide membership lists. Mental disorder support groups jump immediately to mind.

I imagine under a system of hiding the member lists of such groups, they would become much more insular, fewer will just take them for a test drive and instead, go without or create their own group. Dreamwidth is small enough that we don't have enough members to make four different groups for the same thing and still have the be communities in anything but name. This would really divide and conquer and I foresee a dwindling of some very vital resources Dreamwidth offers in the light of this.

I realize I've made more than a few assumptions and extrapolated out quite far here, but I believe these to be reasonable concerns.

[azurelunatic]

I like exploring assumptions and extrapolations, especially when they're based on how these things tend to go. I also think it's reasonable concerns.

I'm still not entirely sure what the practical drama exposure would be in the window between approval, investigation, and departure, if there were no other actions that you personally took during that window.

Other members of the community would be able to notice your presence if they looked during that time, but they would have to look (or, I suppose, if they were reading the community's reading page and they were far back enough that an entry of yours from the last time you were posting showed up, but that's still some variety of "looking"). Joining a community doesn't allow members any access to your locked entries, and presumably you'd take a look at the membership before posting to the community itself.

What other specific vectors of drama from that could you think of?

[shameless2shoes]

Nope, that was pretty much it. You make a very valid point that it's a minimal chance of anything happening.

The scenario that popped into my head was

X is friends with all of my friends. X thinks we should be friends. I hate X but can't say I hate X because everyone I know loves X. Oops, X is in my community! And thinks we can be community buddies together! And now wants to talk etc.

And/or X is a vicious person who decides to comment on my most recent/popular entry "Hey, saw you in Private Community! I can't wait to hear why but I bet I can guess!"

But you're right, there's minimal exposure at worst. Most people have browsing habits that don't have the visiting community profiles as often as I do and that was something I failed to account for.

So I guess that's my original complaint mostly assuaged. Now I'm just worried about growing more sensitive communities.

[azurelunatic]

The big possible vector of drama that I was thinking of, after contemplating your concerns, was not so much other members of the community being able to see the new member, but for a user granting access to another user; that second user is a member of a community with concealed membership; the first user knows of the community and is not a member, and does not want to grant access to any member of that community.

This preference of the first user's could be vaguely discriminatory (not wanting to grant access to anyone with, say, depression), or it could be fully legitimately self-protective (a community that has set up a mutual loathing society with this user, and the community has not overstepped the Terms of Service in their actions to date). Either way, it's that user's choice to avoid the members of that community, and allowing private-membership communities would interfere with that tool.

Granted, a person is never under any obligation to disclose all their random hobbies to a brand-new friend, and there's always the possibility of sockpuppets even as things are now, but having seen a few mutual loathing societies in my time on LJ, it makes me nervous for that reason.

[shameless2shoes]

that second user is a member of a community with concealed membership; the first user knows of the community and is not a member, and does not want to grant access to any member of that community.

I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you're illustrating here. We have a person who is a member of the community and person who isn't -- but then I'm lost on who is denying who membership to where, and how hiding membership lists influences this.

[azurelunatic]

No worries! Let me try to construct an example, using my usual set of alphabetically inspired names. (Most of these names are the names of IRC bots, lest I accidentally pick the name of a real person.)

User Anna has read enough of community Cracktastic to know she does not want to associate with it's members. She is not a member.

User Bit is a member of community Cracktastic, and Bit takes care to avoid showing the membership on Bit's profile.

Community Cracktastic has concealed membership.


Anna and Bit have been talking in another community, and Anna has been thinking about granting access to Bit. If she knew Bit was a member of Cracktastic, Anna would reconsider. While Bit does not need to tell Anna, it is still information that is currently available that would not be, and should be weighed against the good of concealing membership information from hasslers.

[arethinn]

I'm picturing this being hidden on the comm profile page, so as to facilitate not finding an easy, handy list of all members, but the comm still showing up in individual members' profile pages.

[aidenfire]

I personally would be more concerned with it showing up on my profile page. If I joined a comm about a sensitive subject that I wanted to keep private, I wouldn't want anyone who happened to browse through my profile page to be able to see that I am a member.

[azurelunatic]

Thinking about this more, I'm not at all sure how to weigh a community's need for privacy against a user's need for full information before granting access, so I've modified my vote.