I wish to draw all of y'all's attention to the restrictions on posting personally identifiable information, especially someone else's, in The Lobby.
Oops, I was asleep at the switch.
Does PII include email addresses? I had to do a little digging to find the reporter's email address, so I don't know if the intent was to get that email address crawled.
I think the golden rule is not to let The Lobby be a source for obtaining someone's PII.
Somehow I don't really consider the email address of a reporter who has already made it publicly available (unless Mark found it somewhere other than the internet) to be PII. And ditto for a phone number that the reporter chooses to put in her autorespond email. Next someone will claim that "Cory Moore" is PII. Starting to sound too Prosperish for me.
An auto-respond email doesn't get crawled so a phone number in it has more limited exposure. I don't think it is appropriate to have it in a crawled forum. (At my work, a "can't wait" contact is used in auto-response messages should be the department number or an alternate department email address, or some other contact that would be answered by someone at my employer during regular business hours, not a personal number.)
Since the author publicly solicited replies (as well has having a spot under the article to post replies), and since her
business email address is in a spot on USA Today's web site that can be found fairly easily and that has already been crawled, a stronger case can be made for allowing that
business email address here, but I would still consider it a gray area.