Does wordpress allow cyberstalking and posting others’ private information?
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I made a post about this before, but this time I’ll explain what *exactly* is happening.
I used to edit Wikipedia. A year ago an anonymous user was vandalizing Wikipedia by adding vulgarity and pictures of genitals to articles. I removed his edits. He apparently took this as a personal slight against him and began following me around on various sites and stalking me, posting my personal information in correlation with my username. All the sites that he did this to removed his posts and blocked his IP without further question. I haven’t dealt with him since.
A quick google search, however, showed that this user posted personal information about me via anonymous comments on someone’s wordpress blog. Basically: “[My username here] is really [My real name here] and he lives at [my hometown here]! [Expletive here]!” and so forth. It’s very easy from his post to find out my exact home address and phone number.
The first time I reported this to support, the blog was temporarily suspended (which shouldn’t have happened as it wasn’t the blog owner who did the posts) but was returned and the posts were “unapproved”. I take it that means the comments are still there, and the blog owner can easily reinstate them if he so wishes. Which he did, apparently as they were soon back up.
The second time I reported the same comments, WordPress once again “unapproved” them, this time warning the user.
And now they’re back up. This time around, I have gotten little-to-no help from support at all. After weeks of petitioning support, all I got was a comment from Mark saying that my birthdate would be removed from the comments, but nothing else. The birthdate was the least of my worries–I don’t care that my birthdate was posted. Removing my birthdate doesn’t fix anything.
What I find bizarre is that WordPress is so stubborn to removing three anonymous comments from a stalker from a wordpress entry. Not the entire account, not even an entry. Just three comments. At the very least, they could remove my real name and location. Thus, if they wanted to protect my stalker’s right to free speech, they could still keep the bulk of his post which goes “Fuck [my username]” and keep out my personal information.
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Volunteers here in the forums can do absolutely, nothing about this. We have no sway over what wordpress does or doesn’t do, and this is just a repeat of the thread you started earlier: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/someone-posted-personal-info-about-me-in-the-comments-page?replies=28 .
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As I said in the beginning of the post, I’m aware that I posted a similar topic, but this time I’m not leaving anything out.
And there’s no moderators/admins that frequent the boards?
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Moderators are just volunteer bloggers with a title. They are not connected with wordpress nor can they speak for them.
As far as staff coming into the forums, no one knows if they do or not – they say they do, but they leave no trail behind them so who knows? We can literally go weeks without seeing a post by any of them – unless there is a bug that comes up.
The thing is, they are highly unlikely to change their minds from what was said in the previous posting.
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At the very least, do you know of any ways to contact staff *besides* support, so I can talk to a specific person and deal with it there?
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