I don't know about you, but I find sites which needlessly ask for personal information to be annoying. In fact, I will leave a site moment a site requires me to enter anything which is not necessary to complete transaction.

Yes, I do understand that when I apply for a credit card I need to enter my social security number, birthday and mother's maiden name. In these instances, purpose of information is readily apparent - it is needed in order to obtain my credit record. This is normal and expected and thus I don't even think about entering data.

On other hand, why does that free mail account require me to enter my birthday and gender? Worse yet, they want to know how much money I make! Why on earth would I want them this information? They obviously don't need this data to create a free mailbox - so there must be some other purpose which is not obvious.

Of course, they want this data so they can build a profile about me, which in turn can be used to target advertising to me and other's like me. My personal information is not likely to be used specifically - rather, it is grouped together and sold as a unit. For example, an advertiser might want to display a banner to thirty year old males who make $30,000 a year or more. By having this information, free email account company can satisfy that need for their customers - advertisers.

Yeah, I know they promise in their privacy policy that information will not be abused - but Amazon recently told us all how important privacy policies are to corporate America. This company simply modified policy to allow information to be sold to third parties! They sent out an email informing all of their customers that information which used to be private is private no longer.

So a privacy policy does not appear to be a binding document - at least, it's not if it can be changed at will. What this means is a privacy policy is essentially worthless, even if you completely trust company. Why worthless? Well, if that company that you trust with all of your personal data is sold, it is no longer run by people that have earned your trust. New owners could easily modify policy at any time.

Good message boards require people who are willing to post messages to board. In fact, an empty message board is of no use to anyone as it performs no purpose at all.

There are many people who have to work together, usually unconsciously, in order to make a message board actually work and produce effect of a community. The moderator must do his job or board will degenerate into a mess of spam and off-topic junk. Lurkers (people who simply read board without contributing) are not really very useful to board, but they can sometimes be coaxed into contributing.

However, everything is moot without contributors. These are people who actually make a board worth visiting. Good, intelligent contributors who makes posts which have something to do with subject at hand are rare, and a board with more than a couple of them is worth it's weight in gold.

So what does a contributor do, anyway? Well, he or she posts messages to board. Simply put, that's what they do. Anyone can post, but not everyone posts well.

Good contributors understand topic of a message board and make sure that their posts are in line with that topic. In fact, excellent contributors not only understand topic, they are fully in tune with purpose and theme of board.