One of Big Tent’s main goals is to provide a secure online place for community groups to call home. Depending on your group, the notion of security can take on a variety of definitions. For a parents group, it might mean giving members a way to upload photos of their children — and having peace of mind that only other trusted members will see the images. For an alumni group or professional association, security might mean the ability to restrict the roster and other networking resources to members who are paid-in-full. For all groups, it means protecting members from spam and other unwanted intrusions.
Here are three ways we’ve set things up to fortify Big Tent against prying eyes:
1. Restricted access. The only way members can join a Big Tent group is through a special email invitation from a group leader. The leader may invite a member directly, or the member may cruise over to the group’s website and use it to request an invitation. To see this in action, check out our public page for the demo mothers’ group, Bay Town Mothers’ Club. If you look in the upper righthand corner, you’ll see a mini-form for potential members to request group membership:
Keep in mind that invitations are single-use only, and can’t be forwarded to unauthorized recipients.
2. Site encryption. We use https to keep outsiders from accessing your data when it’s in transit between your computer and our servers. This is the same standard that online banking and other sensitive transactions rely on to keep hackers at bay. And for those keeping score, we use 256-bit encryption on our pages, which is much stronger than the 128-bit industry standard.
3. Individual logins. A lot of groups that switch to Big Tent are used to maintaining their own admin-only website areas, where the whole group shares a single username and password to log in. Sharing login information creates a problem whenever a member leaves (or gets banned) from the group, since that person can still access protected data.
On Big Tent, each member of your group uses his or her own email address and password to gain access. Members can change their email addresses at any time, and can even use them to join multiple Big Tent groups.
Stay tuned for another post that covers the tools we offer admins to guard the gates of group information.
Can’t wait to learn more about Big Tent? Sign up for a live web demo, or drop us a line at hello@bigtent.com.
Tags: Security
