The difference between locked categories and open categories


(Richard Morris) #1

After a conversation in one of our locked categories I thought it might be useful to explain what the difference is between those categories with locks beside them and those without locks.

The categories with locks are only visible to those who have achieved a specific trust level. Some of our categories are available only to trust level 1 or greater, this means people who have made an account and interacted with the forum so it knows they are not robots/spammers/lurkers/google web crawlers.

The Health category is like that, because we don’t want health posts to be visible to google search engines. You can see the lock to the left of the category name - posts there are still public but you need to be a logged in user to see them.

Most of the categories on the forum are unlocked. Which means that people who are not logged on, or google web crawlers can see them. This means if you search google say for “ketogenic collagen headaches” on google you will see a link to the forums as the most authoritative link on the topic - that is because that post was in an unlocked category.

eg:

It’s always good to remember that everything on the forum is public, but if you want some anonymity you can always select anonymous mode

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Anonymous mode is turned on by clicking the little spy button :male_detective: in the drop down under your user icon at the top right of the forum page. You’ll be temporarily assigned an anonymous name so you can post without any identifying information.

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Click on the :no_entry_sign: button that has appeared in place of the :male_detective: button and you’ll be back to you usual non-anonymous mode.


(Edith) #2

Ah, ha, ha, ha. I’ve accidentally gone into anonymous mode several times and never figured how it happened. So each time, I’ve logged out and then logged back in. Now I know! Thank you for posting that.


(Richard Morris) #3

The majority of my early support was helping people who had accidentally switched to anonymous and then updated their identifiable details, and then 2 weeks later the anon account went away and they lost all their posts.