Comments show email address.
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When a comment is posted on someone’s site, they have the option to moderate the comment. If they do, they can see information about the comment writer. It shows the comment writer’s url, email address and whois information. What if a comment writer doesn’t want this shown? In particular, what if a comment writer doesn’t want their email address shown? Think of the potential for spam. Is there a way to make that information private?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hello there,
From my tests, I cannot duplicate exactly what you are saying. When someone posts a comment it will send a notice to the blog owner and allow them to approve or deny the comment. The commenter’s WordPress profile will be attached to the comment. The only details that are attached are the username, user’s blog and publish date/time.
As for the front end of the site, if a user inspected the source code of the comment section they would only see the commenter’s username and link to their blog. Since WordPress.com is a social network, this would be the acceptable functionality.
I didn’t see any whois information about the author or email addresses. If you could provide a screenshot of the personal info that is being leaked, I’m sure we can come to a better conclusion.
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At the top of the comment it should say:
“New comment waiting approval on …”
Below that there is the comment with the options of Approve, Spam or Trash.
Below that it says, “More information about” and then it shows information about the comment writer.
Additionally, if you go to the support page here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/manage-comments/
and scroll down to the part about parts of a comment you will see an example.
It shows the comment author name, website, email address, and IP address.
Hopefully this helps. Sorry, no screen shot is available.
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If you like, a screen shot (with personal information removed) is now available. How can that be posted here?
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I see now, you must be looking at the comments through the wp-admin. I understand your concern, having your email address accessible to someone just because you posted on their website is a bit off-putting.
I will tag this post as modlook in order to have a staff member give an official response.
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Hi there,
All the information (name, email, IP address, website) of a commentator is visible only to the site owner. This is done to prevent anonymous spam commenting.
Let me know if you have more questions about this. I’m happy to help!
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There is still an issue. Why should a person have to reveal their email address just to leave a comment on someone’s blog? What if a person just wanted to leave a comment for someone, but not disclose their email address? Do bloggers who don’t have comments on their own blogs realize this is happening? Why should this disclosure of private information have to happen?
While your point about protecting site owners from spam commenting is valid, it comes at the expense of the privacy of those who leave comments. Imagine the opposite spam situation. Imagine if a nefarious blogger just wanted to collect email addresses for the purposes of sending spam. All they would have to do is just post things and let the comments come in. While the current system protects the site owner, it does not protect those who leave comments. This is imbalanced. There are other potential hazards as well.
This is a security issue. Part of commenting on a blog post is being able to do so with some degree of privacy. That is not there though. There could be untold numbers of bloggers (like this one) who don’t have comments on their own blogs and are unknowingly sharing their email addresses each time they leave a comment on someone else’s blog.
There should be a way for a comment poster to have control over this. There should be a way to post comments without having to disclose private information. To balance this though, and address the concern of spam on blogs, there might be a way also for bloggers to block comments from those who don’t reveal their email addresses.
Something needs to be done about this.
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Blog owners are in full control of the comments on their blogs. When a visitor leaves a comment on a blog it is asked to disclose its email address, it’s not something done unknowingly.
For a comment to be anonymously posted without requiring an email address a blog owner must disable the “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail” option on the Settings > Discussion page. You can read more about it here:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/who-can-comment/#who-can-comment
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It doesn’t seem that you quite understand the issue. Please allow this clarification. Hopefully things will be clearer.
If someone doesn’t allow comments on their blog, such as myself, then they might not have an understanding of how comments work when they are posted on someone else’s blog. Like myself, they may be unaware that it is disclosing their email address. They may have thought it was just showing their WordPress name and showing their WordPress site.
Do you understand the concern? In all the time of having my blog, there was no knowledge that each and every comment was informing someone of my email address. There was no reason to think this would be occurring. Do you understand how this could be disconcerting? Imagine finding out that you’ve given your email address to hundreds of people without knowing it.
In the situation you describe above, you seem to be referring to people without WordPress accounts leaving comments. That is not the situation here. If someone has a WordPress account, it automatically shows their email address to the blog owner when they post a comment. But if they are like me, and they don’t have comments on their own blog, then they had no idea this was happening.
Again, the point of the issue is that it has just come to my attention, that my email address has been provided with every comment posted. There was no notification of this or way to opt all. All this time there was the misconception that comments only showed my WordPress User name and linked to my blog.
Does this make sense? Do you understand why this is concerning?
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I know exactly what you mean and I totally understand your concern. To that end, we’re working towards making visible (in a note close to the comment box) that when a logged-in WordPress.com user leaves a comment, their email address and IP address are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog where the comment was left.
Thank you for bringing that to our attention and feel free to reach us again if you have more questions.
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First, thank you for understanding.
Second, while the solution you propose is not ideal, at least in my opinion, if it takes place, it would be a very good step in the right direction. At the very least users would understand what is happening and again, at the very least, be able to choose not to leave a comment. Obviously, at least in my opinion, it would be preferable if users had the ability to leave comments without disclosing this information, but at least this moves things forward.
If possible, once the change you describe above takes place, if you could post a note here saying that it is happened, it would be appreciated.
Thank you for your time.
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