You'll notice that Quick Topic doesn't require you to log in and supply a password, in order to make it absolutely as easy as possible to use. That fact means that the group of people who know your topic's web address have access to the messages for your topic, and can post messages using whatever name they choose. So Quick Topic's privacy depends mostly on the trustworthiness of the members of your group.

Your page won't be indexed by search engines unless you link to it from a public web page. Search engines work by following links from other pages or by visiting pages purposefully submitted to them. Your Quick Topic discussion pages are isolated "islands" on the web unless you link to them from somewhere. Note, however: the browser add-on Alexa toolbar (if you or one of your readers uses it) captures the URL of every page you visit and potentially shares it with others. However, as of 10-April-2002 we exclude Alexa from indexing our pages according to Alexa's specification for excluding search engine robots. The Google toolbar, with Advanced Options on, also sends each page's URL to Google, but Google has assured us that it doesn't use this for crawling or indexing pages. Also, Google Ads (which appear on your pages after you've accumulated 20 messages in all the topics you've created) are customized to your page's content based on a Google 'spider' that reads your page once it's been viewed by anyone (technical note: the viewing of your page activates javascript that's on Google's computers, which alerts their ad-targeting spider to visit your page). Google has assured us that their ad-targeting spider is completely separate from Google's search engine spider so this won't result in your page showing up in Google searches.

One more tip on keeping your topic private: if you visit your Quick Topic forum using a public computer (like at a library), you should erase the browser history so subsequent users don't find the Quick Topic URL. To do this in Internet Explorer, click Tools=>Internet Options, and click the Clear History button. If you're really paranoid, you can clear the browser's cache too.

If you want your topic open for public discussion, you're of course free to publicize its address by sending email to your friends, posting it on your web site, etc.