Invoking Aahz's Law

[womzilla]

In which it is said that the best way to get correct information about a subject is to post incorrect information about it.

I've just been playing with LJ friends groups. One of the features of friends groups is that you can set a group to be "private", which as nearly as I can tell, does nothing at all. I would think that the existence of a private group would not be visible to anyone not logged in to LJ as a member of that group, but that's apparently not true. As a test, I just created a private friends group "nyrsf_cabal" featuring the NYRSF staffers whom I know have LJs, and the contents of it are visible to all.

I would expect that a "public" group would somehow be visible on my User Info page, but that, too, appears to be untrue--the public group "castle" contains supergee and nellorat, but no info about that shows up on my User Info page.

Thus, I posit that "private" and "public" is a meaningless distinction. What say ye, assembled wisdom? What am I missing?

Comments

Re:

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

My only cache-clearing FAQ is "why the hell don't browser caches work?"

The functionality isn't difficult, but as far as I can tell, there hasn't been a browser yet written where the cache works smoothly. Why is that?

(In the case of MSIE, it's in part because Microsoft doesn't want it to work properly. But what's the excuse for the Mozilla products?)