Keeping Your Shout’Em Network Private

Privacy is a key factor of both security and interaction on social networks, such as your Shout’Em network. If you want to create a community, keeping it as open as possible will let more people join. If you created your network for your company or group, keeping the communication private could be essential. Now lets see what exactly we can do to make it happen….

Setting up your Shout’Em privacy settings

Your privacy settings

Go to your Shout’Em settings for your particular network and click on Settings. You’ll find the privacy options under Basic settings. While most options will obviously be found under “Privacy”, you can enable anonymous shouts under “General behavior”. What do the options let you do:

• Allow private profiles lets users make their own profiles private, making all their shouts visible only to their friends. Users will have to subscribe. The subscription will then have to be approved by the user who set the private profile. This option is useful if the user wants to limit his or her communication to a small group of people inside the network;
• A private network is accessible only to its registered members and hidden from the general public. Enabling this options will only let registered users see and create content on the network, but won’t restrict registrations themselves;
• By selecting to approve every new member, every potential user will have to be approved by the network administrator (you) before he or she can see or create any shouts. This options will work nicely if you want to let only certain people join your network;
• By restricting email domains you can limit registrations only to people who register with a certain e-mail address. For example, you could limit it to your company’s domain name. If you limited it to example.com, then john@example.com and lucy@example.com could join, while mark@gmail.com couldn’t. You can restrict access to multiple e-mail domains if needed;
• If you enable anonymous shouts, users won’t have to register in order to create shouts on your network. This can be very useful if you don’t want to bother your users with the registration process at all.

You can always selected the predefined “Private network” option on the right side of the Basic settings, which will lock down the network securely. Remember that by making your network private, you’ll also make its content hidden from search engines!

Whether you decide to keep your network hidden from prying eyes or make it more accessible by making it public, don’t worry. You can always switch options, as you’ve seen, in a matter of seconds.