So what's the deal with the passwords why do I need them? What's the point of locking down individual pages anyway?

Thanks in advance,

To give your website and classmates privacy. Otherwise, the entire site will be viewable to web crawlers and bots. Anyone who posts their email address AND allows their profile to be viewed will be innundated with spam.

I had my email address on the homepage for a few days and I started getting spam. I changed it to a clickable link to 'contact us'.

The only pages that you should not password protect are your homepage and classmate profiles. The rest of your pages is up to you, but if you don't password protect them, your classmates may be hesitant to join because of the lack of privacy.

People have all kinds of reasons to protect all kinds of pages, based on what they're publishing.

Let me be clear on one thing: Our system NEVER shows a Classmate's email address no matter what permissions the Administrator or the Classmate him or herself has applied. That's why you have a white box to type in when emailing a Classmate instead of an email address link to click on. We did that because Cathy is correct -- had we shown email addresses publically your Classmates would be inundated by spam.

If anyone wants to know more about password protect and privacy, there is an extensive writeup about both of these issues in our FAQs section.

Cathy Plotnick wrote:

"Can people find my Classmates' Profile pages by searching Google or other major search engines?

Answer: It depends. Your Classmates' Profile pages are fully indexable by major search engines, but each individual Classmate has the ability to permit viewing of his or her Profile only to fellow registered Classmates. If Profile information has been restricted to only fellow Classmates, then search engines can not get into this information and index it, nor can any non registered Classmate get in. Please note that your Classmates' public profile is found in the search engines when no restrictions have been set by the Classmate him or herself. This is the same information that anybody can see simply by visiting your web site unless a Classmate has restricted Profile viewing to only fellow Classmates. Your Classmates' private information is not findable and will never be displayed even if their Profile is left open to the public. Specifically, your Classmates' email addresses, mailing addresses, and telephone numbers are completely protected and not visible to the public, and not findable/indexable by search engines no matter what. Please note that anyone can still send an email to your Classmates by filling out the contact form at the bottom of any Classmate Profile page. This allows open communication between Classmates and non Classmates alike, while protecting Classmates' personal information."

This works for me.

That's fine that it works for you. However, unless a classmate selects the option to keep their profile hidden except to classmates, then their profile is visible on the web, including the photos they post. Their personal info isn't available, but I found several profiles of my classmates when searching for other reunion sites at which classmates may be listed.

I opted for the privacy. Only our classmate profiles and homepage are searchable online. That is enough for us to help those searching find out site.

One guy posted his email address on our message board. If the message board was available to search engines, he would soon be a spam magnet had I not made the message board private from the beginning.

Right. Anyone should be careful NOT to post their email address on any public site.

Note, for all the reasons already stated above we give both the
Administrator privacy control, and each Classmate privacy control, so everybody can make their own decision. There are many Classmates who DO want their information to be public. They want to share it with friends and family, colleagues, co workers, etc. And they want to be findable in search engines. We've heard it both ways and everything inbetween. For this reason, no matter who's publishing the info (Administrator or the Classmate) there's numerous privacy features built into Class Creator to allow each individual to make their own specific privacy decisions.

I just want to make sure I am understanding correctly--even though a page is password protected from the admin side, like the message forum etc--the alumni DO NOT have to know the password to access protected features?? I am going to go read the FAQ section on this also... We have some rather "shy" types who haven't set up accts yet, due to the very reasons being talked about here.

Correct. A logged in Classmate can access all password protected areas of your web site and all restricted Classmate profiles. Search engines and the general public cannot.