Danny,

I get that you are assigning urls to individual posts because you want to boost the page rank and I acknowledged this in my post.  I also understand why/how people and business organizations use search engines.   

My point is that assigning unique urls to posts now makes them appear as a search result on Google and it wasn’t that way before--before you assigned the unique urls, you couldn’t enter my name into Google and get one of my posts as a result.  It’s great that your daughter’s name doesn’t appear and your posts aren’t displayed as results until the second page.  I guess I’m also lucky that I have a common name, a number of other Google search credits and that none of my old posts pop up in the first 5 pages of results, but unfortunately, that isn’t also the case for a few people that have unique names and felt that they could use them here without consequences.  As I said in my previous post, I looked up a number of people from the kids board and main board after reading about the url change and there were some that had their posts as the first or second result.  If I were the parent of one of the kids from the kids board that had a post pop up as a search result, I would be concerned about my kid’s privacy and how they might explain this to their friends who might Google them!         

This could be very painful for some people--perhaps for some kids who came here to talk about CAH because they didn’t want to talk to their friends, or for anyone that posted with their full name, e-mail, or child’s name in the body of their posts.  I understand that you want to increase exposure and why, but I just know if someone from my high school, or an old neighbor, or someone from work trying to get my office phone number, etc.,  Googled my name, it would make me extremely uncomfortable and angry if a post about my genital surgery or the intersex debate was the number one search result.  I think if some people knew you were going to convert posts to urls to increase visibility of the site, they may not have felt inclined to answer personal questions about themself or their family.  I see this as a big change, not a "tweaking". 

I’m still wondering if you are going to put some warning on the Kid’s page not to use last names or personal e-mails. It seems like an important safety issue and also something that may help people avoid emotionally difficult situations in the future.       

You’re the administrator here and you’ve clearly made a decision that you feel is in the best interest of the site.  I think this is a move that could make some people reticent to post details here and may hurt some people--particularly those who have shared personal details about their life in an attempt to help others or who came here for support themselves and didn’t think it was going to come back to bite them in the form of a Google search result--and this is a big price to pay for a more prominent rank on Google.            

Alison