I have noticed that many people probably don’t mark their support requests as private. This seems rather odd for any company because I noticed that some users are posting sensitive server information in their support request and I’m sure they don’t want that to be indexed on search engines or in some cases I suspect they are not aware its even public to other registered users.
Recently Microsoft had a big backslash because people where not aware their documents on docs.com where public, even when its very clear that the service is for sharing documents, the amount of data from employment contracts and other sensitive data that was send is rather impressive. This was reported in several news outlet and some people are outraged.
Most people understand the forums is for public support, this is why they edit data before posting like domains or IP’s it but not on the support requests. Some people probably assume the request is private because most support tickets in companies are private by nature. The feature request and bug tracker is another story, those things tend to be public.
I think that it should be made more clear that support requests are not private by default. I have read some tickets where I don’t think the info should be available for everyone when its exposing server IP’s, logs and other stuff.
Also, I had the impression support was only open to licensed users but it seems everyone is able to post support requests if I’m not mistaken.
Just my 2 cents.