Adding or Editing a Board: Board Securtiy

Adding or Editing a Board

Board Security

The three options in this section affect this board’s security: whether the board is open or closed, whether users are identified in messages and chat sessions by their real name or login name, and whether a new user’s email address is verified.

The default for a new board is that it is an open, or public, board. These boards are available to anyone who creates an account and logs in, or who visits as a guest.

Closed board

These boards are accessible only to users you or the board manager adds to the list of approved users for that board. For even greater security you can combine private conferences within closed boards to keep sensitive subjects very confidential. You can further specify that all messages in those boards be verified by you, the board manager, or the conference moderator before being posted.

Check the Closed board checkbox if you want this to be a private (closed) board; this setting restricts the board to specific users that you assign to the board.

User name display

A second security option concerns user identities. On closed boards you can, of course, take pains to confirm a user’s actual identity before you enable them to visit the board. On any type of authenticated board, open or closed, you can choose to identify users by their real name or their login name:

Use login names: You can protect user identity to some degree by allowing them to use their login name rather than their real name (which may or may not be their actual name) when posting messages. Their login name appears in messages they post and in chat sessions. However, login names are fifty percent of the login sequence, so using login names may aid hackers.
Use real names: On the other hand, users are more likely to control their actions and observe any board guidelines you may have if they must use their real name (which may or may not be their actual name) when posting messages or participating in chat sessions.

Choose whether you want users shown by their real name or by their login name in messages and chat sessions. The default is real names. Most commercial online services show only the user’s login name for confidentiality; however, it may be more friendly for your board to show users’ real names.

Email address verification

Requiring email address verification for new users ensures that users registering on a board have a valid email address. This prevents a user from registering with a bogus address or an address belonging to someone else. When a new user registers on a board requiring email address verification, WebBoard generates a random password and emails it to the address the user provided.

The user has at least 24 hours to log in using the random password. After logging in, the user can change the password but not the email address. If the user does not log in within the allowed time, WebBoard purges the new account from the database during the daily 4:00 a.m. database maintenance cycle.

On a board with email address verification, users cannot change their own email addresses. Rather, a WebBoard administrator or board managers must change a user’s email address by editing the user’s profile.

To enable email address verification, check the “Use email address verification” box. For new boards, this box is checked by default.