Social news sites (more formally known as social bookmarking) until fairly recently have been the playground of techies and “geeks”. Several sites have expanded their subject matter or made these offerings to more common interests. Many find some of these “bookmarking” sites quite useful and profitable. Digg, Slashdot, or Reddit would be examples of some of the larger, older sites that tailor to more technical users, while sites like propeller and Newsvine would cater to more common interests. Most of these sites are relatively safe and provide some anonymity, however many do allow the creation of user profiles for which considerations should be as to how much information is appropriate. Some users may find the tone of conversation, content, or responses inappropriate for their tastes or for their children. Most of these services provide “user policing” for content and abuse, and may not be in alignment with some users personal preferences.

There are blogs for every imaginable interest. Companies or hosts providing such services often let the user base decide limitations of morality and other rules (if any) applied to the blog. It is each users responsibility to decide for themselves and children they are responsible for to determine what content is appropriate for them. The same guidelines for protection of personal data apply to these types of sites.

Discussion forums share some similarities to the previously mentioned platforms, but are often a bit more “intimate” in nature. It is very common for MMORPG “guilds”, hobbyists, and even churches or civic organization to have personal discussion forums. Again, users should be very aware of the type of content that may be discussed or posted in these forums as well closely investigating the Privacy Policy of the host and what information is requested in the registration. It is not uncommon for these services to request information such as home addresses, birth dates, IM and email information.

The three mentioned platforms above are very commonly used to harvest email addresses for spammers. If you feel the need to post your personal or business email contacts to such forums, it is a good idea to either post it as an image (see if the site allows this) or spell it out like someuser(at)centurylink(dot)net or similar. This makes it at least somewhat more difficult for applications used by spammers to farm addresses from these sites with “web crawling” scripts they commonly use for this purpose.

More commonly found in discussion forums than the other two, users should also be careful of “spamvertisements” on these sites as well. While blogs and social bookmarking sites generally have a little more traffic and user policing, some forums have a hard time or limited resources to track down spam posts. Users should not click on any links or respond to any thread that appears to be spam. Some forums create “spam trap” threads to try and isolate these posts. Do not peruse these threads or open any of the links. The same dangers exist here as in email or IM spam content.