Managing your reputation online - a new career skill?

Want to rewrite your history?

[Casethejoint]

A relative common bone of contention appears to be a user's request that content they added to a forum be removed. I also recently read a thoughful blog post mooting that:

...managing your personal reputation will become a basic life/career skill as the way the world communicates becomes increasing oriented to the web.

I'm guessing that as people transition to having a domain over which they are near completely in control, whether some kind of blog, personal homepage or whatever, they might seek to refactor their online history.

What are the issues here? Should the web be treated as an unforgiving domain where someone could be held to a snide comment they made years ago, or should webmasters be more sympathetic, and accept a greater responsibility in allowing a right of reply and clarification?

[Kahless]

I sure can relate to this being a heavy participant in usenet groups and discussion boards going back 16-17 years. It was not uncommon years ago for most people to use their real name/email in usenet discussions since spam was unheard of and the community was mainly academics and technical folk, and not the masses. There are some boards I intentionally used my real name later to regret it due to not wanting my name/email associated with other wackos posting or working as admins on the same board.

I so hate myself and Google Groups policies for the few times I used my real name in posts I made over 10 years ago. I think I did make a career out of getting this stuff removed.

These are just one liners about a subject, nothing offensive and probably no big deal if anyone reads my comments. But I do not want anyone, particularly a prospective employer judging me or trying to figure me out from one comment or question I made in a forum 10 years ago. Things can easily be taken out of context and there is the never ending spam from my email addresses being harvested from these old posts.

I found most old threads where I posted others had already nuked or removed their posts. But all it takes is one person to quote you, with your name and email. This is where I had the problem in getting others to purge my quote with my email address. Since it was so long ago thier email was no longer valid so there was no way I could contact them. Google Groups admins would not remove my email address from the quote so basically my real email address, name and quotation forever embedded in the history of the internet.

I so hate Google Groups admins for being so inflexable as to not removing my email address from the archive. This not to mention some board admins on a power trip that will not remove posts from years ago. I was also one time completely misquoted by a newspaper reporter. You cannot find the article on their site but sure enough Google cache still has it. What's next will we have to use handles when talking to the newspapers, in order to keep this crap out of Google :)

[rogerd]

This is an ongoing issue for forum operators. I'll often remove a proper name, email address, or other personal info. I generally don't agree to requests to "remove all my posts" or long lists of edits.

We do post warnings that what you say is permanent, so think before posting. Not everyone does.

[Casethejoint]

Nice comment Kahless - from what you've said, I guess that "cleaning up" has been a concern for many long-term net users. I wonder how many people really knew their comments would be near universally available when they made them. Caveat emptor! :(