An e-mail discussion forum on Training and Development based in the USA has been taken down amid a disagreement on reporting what had been said on another website.

US training site Suite101.com reports that failure to communicate caused the end of the Training & Development discussion list, also known as TRDEV-L on 10 October. The discussion list, which operated in a similar way to Fenman's UKHRD over here, had more than 5,000 members and was moderated by David Passmore of Penn State University.

Suite 101.com says that Passmore shut down TRDEV-L after a serious disagreement with Jeff Hill, president of HR-Online, over the posting of messages from the discussion on hr-online. Hill refused to stop adding the messages to the site after some TRDEV-L subscribers complained to Passmore that they were receiving spam (unsolicited e-mail)from advertisers who harvested their names and e-mail addresses from it.

The discussion group appears to have been replaced by a new list called TRDEV, but it's not clear whether Passmore has set this up, or whether it's the work of a group of ex-TRDEV-L members.

The Data Protection Act should provide protection for those subscribing to such lists in the UK, but it's unclear how the law affects things in the USA. Fenman say that they guarantee e-mail address will not be made available outside the forum, and e-mail addresses only appear in their message archive where they've been added by the respondent. For its part, TrainingZONE does not disclose the details of any e-mail subscribers to our site and newswires - for further details, read our privacy statement.