This page is part of the Moderating Microsoft Forums series.


In English forums, everyone is prohibited from soliciting or posting Personally Identifiable Information (PII). For non-English forums, check with your regional policies to see if you are prohibited from collecting PII.

PII includes data such as addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. Some users prefer to use their real names in their profiles, which is perfectly acceptable since they selected the name. Some Product Group members will create an external email address (alias) for use in the forums. This is not considered PII because it cannot be traced back to a specific individual.

There is nothing to prevent a general poster from listing their email address or other info, nor do we specifically want to remove this. However, the following practices should be observed:

  • Although not required, you may want to alert the poster with a warning such as:

“Please be aware that Microsoft public forums are visited by millions of users worldwide, so you may want to consider removing your email address.”

  • Remove any PII such as email addresses from quoted posts that forum users may copy/paste from email exchanges, telephone calls, or chat transcripts.
  • Remove other private information such as product keys, or download codes or credit card numbers. These mistakes are more often seen in consumer forums like Microsoft Community.

 
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