It’s also standard practice of societies to post their minutes publicly, afaik.
And what about the changing it so that, using it as an example, Adams case would have been ‘Adam P’?
It seems the underlying issue is to do with search engines finding our posts around Adam’s ban, and therefore making them accessible to the wider internet.
Is it possible to annotate specific forums so that the search engine’s do not index the posts within those forum’s ? That way, we could still publicise these decisions to our community, but some potential boss would not find this info by doing a simple search.
[quote=“Derek”]As a potential solution there are ~132* posts that contain his full name, we could change them to just say “Adam P”.
I’m not sure if phpBB supports find-and-replace for that type of thing. I’m happy to change them by hand if the other admins believe it’s warranted.
*I just incremented it[/quote]
Late to the party.
PHB BB (at least the ones I used ) had an alias translator. In that any time a string like “cat jumped over the mat” you could replace it with “Cats love mats”
So all of that would be doable… at least on PHB BB forums ive administered
EDIT:
phpbb.com/support/documenta … osting.php
Word censoring is the area you look at
[quote=“Mike Curtis”]It seems the underlying issue is to do with search engines finding our posts around Adam’s ban, and therefore making them accessible to the wider internet.
Is it possible to annotate specific forums so that the search engine’s do not index the posts within those forum’s ? That way, we could still publicise these decisions to our community, but some potential boss would not find this info by doing a simple search.[/quote]
Completely agree with this idea, would be cool if we could. Cheers Ants.
Thanks Ants; I was hoping there was a technology solution that didn’t involve lots of mindless effort 
Thanks for the suggestion Jackie.
Usually the Diatribe admins and moderators would just decide on something like this that just affects Diatribe.
However, because this involves editing minutes and posts by committee members in an official capacity, I’m going to put this to the national committee.
What if the NZLARPs forum was made visible only to those logged into Diatribe (i.e. not guests)? This would avoid having to mess around with membership lists, but would stop any information from being picked up randomly by search engines.
I quite value having the forum with NZLARPS business visible to the general public. It shows we’re a thriving society and sometimes contains information of general use.
The National Committee of NZLARPS have voted to edit all mentions of Adam’s full name on public Diatribe forums to read “Adam P”. The vote was 3 in favour, 1 opposed and 1 abstention. I will implement this soon.
The committee doesn’t feel that we are legally obliged to do this, but on balance we felt it was the right thing to do. Thank you for raising the issue and offering your thoughts on it.
[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]The National Committee of NZLARPS have voted to edit all mentions of Adam’s full name on public Diatribe forums to read “Adam P”. The vote was 3 in favour, 1 opposed and 1 abstention. I will implement this soon.
The committee doesn’t feel that we are legally obliged to do this, but on balance we felt it was the right thing to do. Thank you for raising the issue and offering your thoughts on it.[/quote]
Awesome outcome, cheers Ryan et al.
[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]The National Committee of NZLARPS have voted to edit all mentions of Adam’s full name on public Diatribe forums to read “Adam P”. The vote was 3 in favour, 1 opposed and 1 abstention. I will implement this soon.
The committee doesn’t feel that we are legally obliged to do this, but on balance we felt it was the right thing to do. Thank you for raising the issue and offering your thoughts on it.[/quote]
Really worried about this whole issue. (Concern trolling annoys me at the best of times)
I’m very much against the going back and altering official records of any kind.
I’m similarly concerned at the fact that this would include altering official minutes, of which usually the only copies are the ones posted on the forum. While I respect that the National Committee has made a decision, are we absolutely certain that obfuscating official history is the best course of action? Before the wholesale alteration of records, could unedited records be kept offline somewhere in case they are needed later?
I agree with Anna, from a legal perspective I think the society should retain un-edited minutes, even if what is ‘publicly’ viewable is altered for privacy. As long as they are open to requests for viewing. The worry I would have would be a good lawyer successfully, if the situation ever arose, arguing that the minutes are invalid evidence due to the fact that they could not be trusted as an official record.
It would probably not be a problem in this case, but your setting a precedent (whether you intended to or not) and its more about covering bases than anything else tbqh
As secretary, I take the legal record of the society’s decisions very seriously. There are very few explicit references to Adam Pin official records, and most are simply inclusion of his full name in the attendance section of minutes. He is of course mentioned in relation to his removal as treasurer in 2010 and the motion to expel him from NZLARPS and ban from attending NZLARPS projects in 2012.
I have taken copies of all relevant material to ensure that our records are maintained, and we will be checking it to ensure that it is complete before any redactions are made.
As the records are currently public, anyone concerned about the public record can of course do the same.
Thanks for the reassurance, I/S.
[quote=“IdiotSavant”]As secretary, I take the legal record of the society’s decisions very seriously. There are very few explicit references to Adam P in official records, and most are simply inclusion of his full name in the attendance section of minutes. He is of course mentioned in relation to his removal as treasurer in 2010 and the motion to expel him from NZLARPS and ban from attending NZLARPS projects in 2012.
I have taken copies of all relevant material to ensure that our records are maintained, and we will be checking it to ensure that it is complete before any redactions are made.
As the records are currently public, anyone concerned about the public record can of course do the same.[/quote]
Awesome 
This action of altering historical records is literally an Orwellian response to what is basically concern-trolling.
Did anybody investigate my suggestion to determine if we can remove the search engine spidering from specific forums ? Moving posts relevant to Adam’s ban to non-spidered forums maintains transparency whilst alleviating the putative risk of some potential employer finding out our Society’s response to Adam’s behaviour.
Furthermore, do we have any evidence or legal opinion that replacing his full name with “Adam P” will have the desired anonymising effect ?
This is all quite apart from the fact that search engine’s maintain their own database of cached data on which the searches are based. i.e. will this make the blindest bit of difference ?
It would be Orwellian if we changed the meaning, but we’re not.
It would be concern trolling if Jackie wasn’t genuinely concerned and was for some reason trying to disrupt the forum or the society. I take it on good faith that her concern is genuine, not trolling. I think it’s disrespectful to suggest otherwise Mike.
I want to spend as little time on this as possible, because dealing with stuff related to Adam is already far too time-consuming. I suspect members would be shocked to discover just how much society and Diatribe administrator time is still being spent on him now, even with him excluded from the society. It’s a lot of work that would be more productively spent on something else.
A few edits is simple, and will certainly have the result that anyone casually searching his full name won’t find anything personally identifying here. I don’t think anyone is asking for more exhaustive or technical action than that. It’s an action that the people who are concerned about this seem happy with it, a simple action, one with no specific foreseeable negative consequences, and it’s the one the national committee has resolved on.
Thank you Ryan.
I had to google ‘concern trolling’ to find out what Mike thought I might be doing. He’s incorrect. I’m disappointed that he made that conclusion.
It was nothing more than an off the cuff observation, to the degree I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking above and beyond ‘huh, it’d be a bit shit if someone not associated with NZLARPs found this, considering he’s already being appropriately punished by NZLARPs for what he’s done.’ Or something to that effect. IDK. I didn’t have an agenda. It was an observation and an opinion.
I give up. Honestly.