New BS Forum – Big Concern!

I see you now have a forum on your affiliate site.

It’s probably a nice idea, but I have a few problems with it :

It is automatically using my Account Username as my forum name. I don’t like to give hackers a heads-up on my account details! Sure they’ll need my password too, but giving them my username to start with is just dumb. And even if I don’t post anything, my account username is displayed right there on the front of the forum under the list of ‘Active Users’.

I appreciate that it’s handy for people to automatically have forum accounts without needing to register again, but giving out usernames is crazy. Of course you could say “But our forum is private, only other BS users can see it”. Well firstly, I don’t even want other BS users to have my username, and secondly it isn’t difficult for unscrupulous people to sign up for a BS account so that is really no excuse.

But it also seems like you intend the forum to NOT be private, it’s accessible right from the front page of your site, without logging in. When I was logged in it displayed these stats :

Currently active users: 966 (7 users and 959 guests)

I guess most of those 959 guests were search engine bots, scrapers, etc. I am sure many people don’t want their BS username being broadcast to the public. It does seem that the list of Active Users is only viewable when logged in, but still as I said I don’t want my username viewable even to other BS members, no offense as of course the vast majority are trustworthy but there’s no doubt that hackers occasionally manage to sign up for accounts, for the purpose of trying to get more access to the system. Over the years I have helped many companies with hacker problems, and in this case giving out everyone’s account username is a pretty obvious and serious problem.

Thanks for listening to my concerns.

Jam.

ps. I recommend firing whoever thought it was a good idea to re-use the account usernames as the forum usernames I’m serious, they shouldn’t be working in I.T. !!