When registering on this site can we hide our E-mail addresses? There is a privacy option available but this is not exactly what the rules say to do. Please advise.

No real reason to hide it. You will miss out on some info if you do. A lot of info comes by private e-mail or allows you to converse on off topic or length questions you may not want to bother with here. Stay away from private chat or messaging on any of these forums!!! Somebody may be listening in! Either post publically or use e-mail.

It has always been a requirement here that you list a valid email address. Sure, there are pluses and minuses, but I believe the upside outweighs the downside. There are things that others may wish to share with you or they may wish to engage you in a private conversation off the board. Having your email address available means that you will get a lot more information than if you do not have it available.

When the new board software was installed about a year ago, one of the features it included was the ability to either show or hide your email address. If it is was entirely up to me, that feature would be disabled. However, it is part and parcel of the new forum software and although I don’t like it I am not going to go to the expense of having a workaround written and installed. So you can choose to have your email address available or hidden. I’ll leave that up to you.(You do need to use a valid email address when registering or the validation email will not reach you - what you have in there now isn't going to cut it.)

Sure, you may get some rod building spam from time to time. But that would be about it. General spam does not come from this site but from people you correspond with or who correspond with you who have Yahoo or Hotmail type accounts. That’s how these companies make money - they collect and sell any and all email addresses that pass through their systems.

As far as instant messaging features go, this forum software has that feature but I have not and will not turn it on. There is something that many don’t know about the instant messaging features on some forums - it’s not necessarily private. The board administrator/s may have the ability to “listen” to these instant messaging conversations. Obviously I didn’t have to mention this and I could just say that I promise not to listen in to your private conversations with other users, but I just don’t want to go down that road. It just rubs me the wrong way. As someone mentioned to me earlier today, it’s “spooky.”

If you want the ability to receive information off the site and to converse with other builders privately, I’d recommend you go into the “my control center” section of this site and under “privacy” uncheck the “hide email address” box.

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