How do we communicate critical private information using Get Satisfaction?

Hi Guy,
First off, it's really confusing when you say "we" but you mean "them". As I was reading this it sounded like you wanted PBwiki customers, such as yourself, to see and share private information. We don't have plans for that anytime soon.

We are, on the other hand, looking at ways for company employees to ask for certain pieces of private data (such as an email address). We'll let you know what we come up with.

ah, guy. we are trying. allow me to try and clarify:

we have definitely discussed a private messaging system, both between customers and companies and also between customers and customers, but have not yet put it on the roadmap for product development because from our perspective right now, with our limited internal resources, making the public interactions on the site work better should be priority number one, two, and three. there are a lot of other private messaging functions out there right now; undoubtedly we'll get there eventually, but not anytime too soon.

that said, we have seen in our system, with quite a bit of frequency, users leaving personal and/or private information that should really only be viewable to companies in their posts, because they have no way to communicate with the company otherwise. and, we see that a number of companies have a need to collect additional types of private information from their customers, very specific to their needs, and often they have to "round-trip" with the customer a couple of times to request that info via email. see, for example, this thread in rescuetime, where the company rep has to request more info via email that we could be collecting for them (privately) on the site:

http://getsatisfaction.com/rescuetime...

for rescuetime it's mostly bug reports, but we see this happen for other companies with usernames, account numbers, even credit card numbers. so we're planning to add a feature in the short term for companies to add custom fields to the topic entry form within their company area to collect additional types of data. that's what leslie was trying to say.

also, guy, something i've been meaning to mention: if you want to discuss any of this (this or any of the other issues you've either called out or contributed to) in more detail than you feel like you can get through get satisfaction, you should give me a call: 415-867-1708. i'd be happy to walk you through where we are as a company, what our plans are for the future (as far as we know them), how we're structured the pbwiki relationship and what we're doing to continually improve it, or any other conversation you'd like to have. we are *very* interested in being open and transparent, but there's a limited amount we can convey within this environment, and sometimes it's just more enlightening to talk on the phone person-to-person.

that offer also extends to anybody else reading this discussion topic. happy to talk! ask for lane if my wife picks up. :)

oh, the environment works fine for me! i just wanted to make sure that if it wasn't working for you for whatever reason, you had another option. and again, that goes for anybody else reading this. hell, if you're ever in SF, i'll take you out to lunch, my treat. come on down!

that said, now that you've clarified where you're coming from, i think it's a really interesting question, and an excellent point. a per user opt-in "contact me" form is a really interesting idea, as is a craigslist-style "anonymize my email" passthru. we'll definitely discuss. thanks!

Tom: We do have plans for something like this. We may simply add a field on our topic-creation page that only company employees can see so customers can add sensitive information like account numbers. We might add that on the company-to-customer side as well, so that companies can do the same. I don't have a timeline for this, but it will undoubtedly be part of our new company tools, which we're building out this summer.