When Is A Community Safe?

More and more we see the warning: "Do not give your password to anyone, EVER!", but more and more I'm seeing a huge amount of online communities such as Spicypage asking for just that...for other accounts on other servers, and from the info at their whois screen, they haven't been operational for more than a year.

I visited the site months ago after coming across it in MyBlogLog, and since it's still now in 'Beta', what I saw didn't appeal to me at the time. This afternoon I went back and went to update my blog info, but wasn't allowed to.

They asked for my Blogger ID and password, which I didn't provide.

Many of the blogs I visit; having varying degrees of experience online relating to password issues; are members of this community in particular, some in fact who are pretty hard core in being the ones to tell newbies what's not safe.

Do they know something I don't? Are they 'friends' with the people at Spicypage? Have they given in for the sake of losing traffic if they didn't provide their UserID and password to their site accounts?

More importantly should it ever be a requirement to give your confidential information to an online community that gives anyone direct access and control of your site? What safety net is there to prevent someone from being employed for the sake of getting just that capability?

Can't happen? It's one of the tactics I used to find my father, kids.

Do you feel really that safe in giving out your userid and password to other sites? Comment.

NOTE: While this entry cites my user experience at Spicypage.com, it should not be considered endorsement, judgement, or determination of quality of their services whatsoever. This entry is for the benefit of readers of this site, not any company trying to justify asking for a person's password.