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I have encountered a number of cases where sensitive information has been posted inside questions that I have viewed.

Typically, I immediately edit to remove or redact the information, I will leave a comment and also flag it.

It is imperative that this information gets removed quickly before it is indexed by the search engines.

At times, there are no moderators around, so my question is there anything else I can do to save the asker, or is what I am doing the best course of action.

Example I encountered today :- Converting text data into CSV using PowerShell

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Thank you @james, for your quick and valuable action, We believe moderation starts with the community itself!

What to do in such cases is what you have already done!

  • Flag to alert the moderators,
  • Edit to remove the sensitive info,
  • Comment to alert the OP.

BTW, The OP bears full responsibility for publishing sensitive information in his question

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    Thanks. Would hate to see someone lose their job or somebodies information leaked. Hopefully is a lesson to him to them to be more mindful.
    – James Randal
    Commented Sep 24, 2018 at 7:02
  • Thanks once again, I really appreciate your kind feeling, As a moderator, I will try to contact him privately to avoid such this in his coming questions!
    – Mohamed El-Qassas MVP Mod
    Commented Sep 24, 2018 at 7:10
  • I don't have enough reputation to see deleted posts, but was the question deserved to be deleted? If I'm not mistaken, mods have a tool to redact a specific revision (so the revision will be gone for normal users), so the question could be salvaged without totally deleting it...
    – Andrew T.
    Commented Sep 24, 2018 at 8:31
  • The question has been deleted by Owner
    – Mohamed El-Qassas MVP Mod
    Commented Sep 24, 2018 at 8:51
  • I totally get that its OP's responsibility, but can we add a bullet point to remind them about removing any sensitive info before posting. As the edit history is going to show anyway :)
    – Arun Vinoth PrecogTechnologies
    Commented Oct 17, 2018 at 3:01

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