This is a public forum, right? I've had a public review of my first assignment already - quite harmless and sincere, as far as I can tell, taking the reviewer completely on trust, which I now have no choice but to do.

I don't think the content of the review gives too much away to the general public, but next time I might not be so lucky. Story ideas are not protected by copyright law, and we are all just about to expose ours on a public forum, in increasing detail.

Of course, what makes a novel publishable (or not) is the way you write it. Story ideas as such are ten-a-penny, I am told. (Even Shakespeare stole other people's.) And, of course, even in a private group, all the members implicitly trust each other not to steal each other's texts or ideas.

But when someone gatecrashes the group and posts a public review of your first assignment, and still hasn't replied to your follow-up e-mail to clarify who he is, how he was able to read and publicly review the Item, and what his agenda is, it's quite disconcerting.

If I disable reviews of my assignment Items, will it still be possible to judge the contest entries? My guess is Yes, but thanks if someone can confirm. I believe it is reviewers, not authors, who choose whether reviews will be public or private? Therefore, the only way to prevent public reviews is by disabling reviews altogether?

Can anybody confirm whether the setting, Group Access Only (to this group) restricts access only to actual group members, or to anybody who clicks your box on a post in this forum?

How paranoid should we be?

In the meantime, I'm off to find out how to disable all reviews of an Item....