Your Privacy on lasqueti.ca

Online privacy is a very personal thing.  Some people make their living by being "out there" on the web, and others want to remain completely anonymous.  lasqueti.ca tries to allow you to choose your own, personal comfort level.

Privacy Protection on lasqueti.ca

The following are some of the measures in place on lasqueti.ca to protect privacy:

• choose your own "user name" - this name becomes your persona on the site. It could be your full name if you want your identify known, or it could be a nickname if you want to keep your identity more private - your choice.
   
• your real name and e-mail address are never revealed on the site.  Your e-mail address is needed so the site can contact you (for example, to send you a new password) and your real name is only required so the webmaster can confirm you identity to assign appropriate privileges to your account.  Otherwise, they are kept strictly confidential.
   
• personal contact form - people can send you an e-mail through the site using your "contact form" (e.g., http://lasqueti.ca/user/2/contact ) The site sends you the message without ever revealing your e-mail address to the sender.  Only logged-in users can use the contact forms to reduce spam.
   
• any e-mail addresses posted on the site is protected from "e-mail harvesters" by some clever anti-spam tools (see http://lasqueti.ca/forums/lias/website/anti-spam)
   
• control over your own posts - if you don't want an item posted any longer, you can simply delete it.  Go to the post, edit it, and press the delete button at the bottom of the edit form. 
  There are also some tools on the site to help manage your photos,  news & event posts, and classified ads - these tools make it easy to edit and delete your posts on the site.
   
• "private" and "cloaked" discussion forums - the discussion forum (message board) area of the site is really "none of their business" (them being the rest of the world!).  The forum area is "cloaked" so that search engines (like Google) don't index this part of the site - this allows us to have community discussions without those discussions showing up on Google!  Discussions can also be made completely private - that is, restricted to a specific group of users.  (If you want a private discussion area set up for your group, just ask the webmaster.)

Details about indexing on Google (and other search engines)

Google is a search engine, like all search engines, it uses a "web crawler" to create an index of content on the web.  When you do a search on Google, you ar not really "searching the web" - you are actually just searching the index that has been assembled by these crawlers.

Of course, much of the content on lasqueti.ca should be indexed so people can find it using Google.  For example, if you search for "Valeria de Rege" or "lasqueti accommodation" on Google, we want results from lasqueti.ca to be listed.  In other words - we want Google to "crawl" our site and index it.

However, this is not true for the discussion forum.  These discussions are really of no interest to "outsiders" and should not be indexed on Google.  For example, when I search for "Valeria de Rege" I don't want results about Valeria looking for a ride to the ferry and a search for  "lasqueti accommodation" should not yield a discussion about zoning infractions.  In otherwords, there are areas of the site we don't want Google to crawl and index.

There is a small file that is part of any website called "robots" with instructions for any web-bots who care to look - it contains information about which parts of the site are meant for "public consumption" and other stuff.   Of course, the robots can simply ignore that file (as all spam-bots do), but the major search engines respect them - it's good for them because then they don't end up indexing stuff that really isn't useful, as deemed by the content providers themselves. 
On lasqueti.ca, the robots file specifies that the discussion forum and classified ads areas, among others, should not be indexed, and thus should not show up in Google search results.

Note though: This does not mean these areas are "private" - they are still public spaces and should be treated as public.  These efforts are simply there to help Google keep its index being cluttered up with irrelevant content.  Also - crawlers follow links.  So it is possible for some of this content to make its way into Google's index.