Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [31]
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If you want to head off bad comments at the pass, or prevent further clamor on a pointed post, you can choose “Disable comments” in the drop-down list instead. Doing so won’t remove any of the comments that have already been written about a post—that you’ll have to do manually as explained above—but it’ll keep people from writing new ones. If you change your mind later, you can click the same arrow and choose “Enable comments.”
Controlling Sharing
On Sharing Others’ Posts, you learned how to share a post written by a friend who’s in one of your circles. When someone posts a link using the Public visibility setting (Writing a post while viewing your main stream), anyone can link to it and see it, so sharing is simple.
But when you’re posting something to one of your hand-picked circles, you might not want to let those people share that post with the people in their circles. Just like with real-life storytelling and gossip-spreading, the results can sometimes turn an innocent quip or story into a great big drama. So Google+ includes two features that help keep sharing in check: a warning message and the ability to lock your posts.
When you post something to any group other than Public, if one of the people in your circles clicks that post’s Share link, Google+ shows them a little reminder that you didn’t share the post publicly, so you probably don’t want it shared with the whole online world.
The message is basically there to remind folks to be considerate, and most people will. But you never know when somebody—perhaps that old coworker of yours who got fired over an email incident back at WidgeTech—is going to test the limits of social graces. Because Google+’s polite reminder may not dissuade everyone, if you post something of a sensitive nature, you can clamp down on casual sharing of it. To do so, click the little gray arrow in the upper-right corner of your post and choose “Lock this post.” That way, your post won’t include a Share link.
That means your friends can no longer share your post—at least not in the easy way they could before. But keep in mind that if you put something online, there’s always a way for someone to share it in ways you don’t want. Even if you disable sharing and comments and do your best to keep a post inside your selected circles, people can still share your stuff by:
Copying the text of your post and then pasting it somewhere else in Google+, into an email, onto Facebook or Twitter, or wherever.
Taking a screenshot of your post (by pressing PrtSc on a Windows computer or ⌘-Shift-3 on a Mac), cropping the image, then posting it somewhere.
Telling other people about what you posted, whether on Google+, in person, or any other means.
So keep that in mind when you’re thinking about posting something. And if you come across a locked post, the person who wrote it is very firmly asking that you don’t share that joke, photo, or bit of humor with anyone else, even though you technically could.
Bottom line: If you really want to keep something private, don’t post it on Google+ or anywhere else online.
Blocking, Muting, and Reporting Posts
Not every post in your stream will be a winner, and some you might get downright sick of because they keep jumping to the top of your stream as they collect comments and +1s. That’s what that little arrow in the upper-right corner of each post is for—telling Google+ that a post is either too prominent