Restricting Forum Access

[ehmd]

The new forum is a good idea for customers and will prove to be a good resource for help / tips / advice for everyone.

I do have some issues with the current setup of the forum.

1) Read access is open to anyone on the Internet, hence anything a customer might write about using Ebase with supplier xxx's system, can be read by the supplier and 3rd parties looking to sell systems and services. Also would email addresses be open to search engines and spammers, hence generating junk mail ?

Solution would be to make read access to the forum only available for registered users.

2) Third party suppliers are both users of the Ebase system and suppliers of backoffice systems to local authorities. I feel rather uncomfortable about posting anything on here which one of our 3rd party suppliers may be able to see. Not sure how this can be handled but there does seem to be a conflict of interest here. Another supplier we use only allows customers and not 3rd party suppliers, access to their forums.


Mark Dunkley
East Hertfordshire Council

[Vanessa]

Thanks for your comments Mark. We have noted your concerns regarding public access to our forums and will discuss this internally and post a response to that a little later.

Regarding security of email addresses: If you select 'no' to the 'Always show my e-mail address:' option in your profile, your email address will be hidden in your profile and when you post messages on the forum. It will not be visible or accessible to the public or any bots that gather email addresses on the net.

You will see your own email address when you are logged in, but it will be hidden from other users on the forum, registered or otherwise.

For added (email) security, we have enabled a "User email via board" feature, which allows users send email to each other via this board.

This means that if you choose 'show' your email address, it just displays the 'email' button in your profile, but your email address remains private/hidden. The Email button just links to an online 'email form' and the sender will not know what your email address is, unless you decide to reply to them.

[Sarah]

Further to our previous post, your concerns regarding public access to our forums have been discussed and we are still keen to make the Forum as open as possible for our customers.

We will continually review the situation and reconsider the setup if it becomes an issue.