Make Your Site Private

By default, a new site on Free-Conversant is open to the public. That means that anybody that knows about your site can read all of the pages, sign up as a member of the site, and then post new messages to the site. This is known as a public site.

A basic feature of Conversant is the private site. This is a site that's actively managed by an administrator (or a group of administrators), and which people can't read all of the pages without already being members, and they can't sign up to be members: the administrator must set up their membership.

There are two ways to change the security settings on your site. Using the main admin pages in your site, or using the wizards. In this document we'll look only at the Security Wizard.
 

Setting Security Through the Wizard

You can access the wizards page by tacking __wizards__ to the end of your site's root path. So, if your site is named "example", then the wizards page would be found at

http://www.free-conversant.com/example/__wizards__"

Let's go through it step by step:
 

1. From the first page of the wizard, click the Continue>> button

 
2. If you want your site to be completely private, and you want the members of the site to sign on every time they visit, then change the Authentication Method from Cookies to HTTP Authentication. If you leave it on Cookies, then your members will only have to sign on once, and they'll be given a cookie. The cookie will allow them (or anyone using the member's computer) to return to the site without signing in again.

 
3. If you chose HTTP Authentication then you're done.

 
4. If you chose Cookie-based authentication, then you've got three more decisions to make.
1. Do you want to allow people to sign up for this site? If so, then click on Yes in the first group of radio buttons. If you want to manage the membership yourself, click on No

 
2. Do you want to allow guests (non-members) to view the full site (discussion- group pages and published pages)? If so, click on Yes. If you don't want to give them full access, then click on No.

 
3. Finally (and this only applies if you clicked No in the previous question), do you want to allow guests (non-members) to view published pages ("bound URL's") only? If so, then click Yes.** If you don't want the public to even see your published pages, then click No. 
   
   ** This is good if you're using your Free-Conversant site as a regular web site: you'll write and store your messages in the regular "Conversation" area (discussion group), and then publish them to public pages. Totally optional, of course.

You can also change the security settings for your site through the preferences for the MainResponder Plugin, at

.../example/
  admin/
    conversations/
      example/
        preferences$conversation=example&plugin;=mainResponder%20Interface