Additionally the document notes that it shouldn’t be shared publicly. I think you ask some important and good questions in this post, but I think this combined with you unnecessarily outing an employee, not engaging with most comments that provide answers to your questions, and your spreading of unconfirmed rumors are all harmful norms to promote on a public forum. I think posts like this raise similar questions while not being harmful and fostering beneficial discussion, and I wish this post was written similarly.
To be fair, the request not to share the document publicly is not very prominent: it’s a non-bolded sentence halfway down the second page. It would be easy to miss if you hadn’t read the document carefully. (When I’ve written private documents in the past, I generally have it in red in the header or something similarly unmissable.)
I do think the moderators should probably remove the link. If we have decent evidence that the OP knew the document was private, I think that speaks very poorly of them and I’d support more draconian repercussions.
To be fair, the request not to share the document publicly is not very prominent: it’s a non-bolded sentence halfway down the second page. It would be easy to miss if you hadn’t read the document carefully. (When I’ve written private documents in the past, I generally have it in red in the header or something similarly unmissable.)
I do think the moderators should probably remove the link. If we have decent evidence that the OP knew the document was private, I think that speaks very poorly of them and I’d support more draconian repercussions.