[theme-reviewers] Hidden IP field in theme contact form

[Bryan Hadaway]

There's nothing wrong with it being hidden in and of itself, the word
"hidden" here is having a certain negative connotation applied to it that
is faulty. I've never seen a form EVER that announced your IP will be
recorded or shown any such field or even so much as had a privacy policy
link nearby.

I think we all assume that our IP address is being recorded pretty much
anytime we do anything (of course, the novice is probably not privy to
this). I guarantee there are a couple hundred plugins that collect IPs
without some prominent way of disclosing that, both of the plugin user and
the visitor's of that person's website including Automattic plugins.

There's seemingly no precedent here for this, are you admins going to set
one, that's always fun right?

Why not just ask this person why the contact form needs an IP field, I'm
99% sure its for spam, statistical reasons or both at which point how is
that any different than GA or other stat scripts that collect IP addresses
for location info?

It's an interesting conversation sure, but an easier way to solve this
might be to ask what can a person possibly do maliciously with a list of
random IPs that are essentially meaningless to any intent considering the
author won't know or care about any of these users in the sense of trying
to "do something".

If your thoughts are it doesn't matter, the user needs to know that their
IP address is recorded regardless of the use you're opening a can of worms
and creating a precedent that rightfully needs to then be opened up to all
themes, plugins, WordPress.org (comment forms) itself and further. The
reach is too far and we shouldn't really have a say in such matters.

The reason I HATE when issues like this come up is because if you single
one person out, you better scrutinize everyone else too, but that often
doesn't happen.
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