Why is this forum displaying my email in public?

[burner]

I was searching google and found my email being displayed in plain text as a "guest user", This info is readable by all and being indexed by search engines. Can the forum admin please hide this information? It's disappointing that a security company is leaking information like this.

See this thread for examples:

https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=200746.0

[DavidR]

The only reason I can think of is that account was closed when you still had a post or you hadn't assigned a user name. Also that there were other contributors in the topic.

[burner]

It seems to have happened for the posts around 2017.
I checked a selection of posts around that time and can see other users email addresses are displayed in that way. It looks to me like the user account system was migrated and they used the email address rather than the username.  Either way, how do we go about getting it cleaned up for peoples privacy?

https://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=2.10100

[DavidR]

Users would have to request deletion and some sort of proof that the account/email was theirs, how they do that I don't know.  As an Avast User helping other avast users I'm limited in what I can do.  I guess it would have to be a request to one of the Avast forum Administrators.

As the account essentially doesn't exist, if you click on a username you would see an error. It isn't a case of deleting the account and posts in one action.  Posts would have to be removed manually.

[bob3160]

Since this goes all the way back to 2017, why not simply remove all the posts in that topic?

[Asyn]

Since this goes all the way back to 2017, why not simply remove all the posts in that topic?

Hi Bob, that's something for the mods/admins to handle.

[bob3160]

Since this goes all the way back to 2017, why not simply remove all the posts in that topic?

Hi Bob, that's something for the mods/admins to handle.

Obviously or I would already have done it.

[DavidR]

Since this goes all the way back to 2017, why not simply remove all the posts in that topic?

If you have a look at that link that was given, it isn't a topic but a Board (sub-forum), there are literally thousands of topics in that sub-forum, god knows how many posts in those topics.

Unfortunately there isn't a magic wand to do this, but painstaking manual task.

[burner]

Since this goes all the way back to 2017, why not simply remove all the posts in that topic?

Unfortunately there isn't a magic wand to do this, but painstaking manual task.

There sort of is but it would require backend access to the forum database and locating any user marked as Guest with a username that has an '@' in it. Should get you pretty close to all the affected posts. It's really something the forum hosting provider should be doing.