Privacy for members
By Jamie O'Reilly on Monday, 27 July 2015
Posted in General Issues
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Hi

We've had a complaint from a registered user of a membership website that we built in joomla and have sued Easy Social (and Easy Blog and Easy Discuss). She doesn't like the fact that when you Google her name, Google lists a result for her that indicates she's a member of this website and has a profile on the Easy Social network on there. She doesn't want people who are not site members/registered users from being able to discover that she is a member of this organisation - from a privacy perspective.

We have set a 'no follow' rule in the robots.txt file and that does appear to now limit what is shown but there is still a listing of a sort which does in effect confirm her membership.

Can you advise if/how we can hide this?

Kind Regards

Jamie
Thanks Arlex. All fixed.
Jamie O'Reilly
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Friday, 16 October 2015 03:41
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Hey Jamie,

I have help you added this following noindex,nofollow meta tag in this file -> JoomlaFolder/components/com_easysocial/views/profile/view.html.php 


		$document = JFactory::getDocument();

		$document->setMetadata('robots', 'noindex,nofollow');

so the user profile page should not get index again by Google. But you have to wait for a while and let Google auto regenerate the new index link in your site.



// Wait for few days and using this following keyword search in Google

site:yourdomain.com
Arlex Wong
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Tuesday, 28 July 2015 02:14
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Hi Arlex

Thanks for doing this. I'll take a look in a few days time once Google has had a chance to reindex the site and hopefully all will be good. Many thanks again.

Jamie
Jamie O'Reilly
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Tuesday, 28 July 2015 02:18
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You're welcome Jamie
Arlex Wong
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Tuesday, 28 July 2015 02:25
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Hi

Two months have passed now and I was sure this issue had been resolved with your last fix but apparently not. The original complainant has made contact again saying the issue is continuing. I Googled her name again and sure enough it is still finding this link to her profile page albeit with very little information showing but enough to reveal that she is a member of the website/group which she is very unhappy about.

Can you help?

Thanks

Jamie
Jamie O'Reilly
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Monday, 05 October 2015 19:09
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hey Jamie,

I have double check again and view the page source, the meta tag is shown correctly (reference link : http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-unindex-pages-from-search-engines ) and it should prevent the Google index the page, you can take a look of my screenshot below.

What my suspect is Google previously already indexed that page but I am not really sure when Google will remove that indexed page from their server, because this is out of our control.
Arlex Wong
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Monday, 05 October 2015 20:39
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Thanks for the quick reply Arlex. I see that you've added the code as you said you would which is great.

Two questions. Firstly, is this going to stop Google from finding any other content on the site - such as the site meta description or Google Analytics as we wouldn't want to hide this important information from Google. Second question, I know that you've tried to hide the url in question from Google robots but is there not a way to actually change the url itself? Surely there's no reason why someone's name needs to be shown at the login point?

Thanks

Jamie
Jamie O'Reilly
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Monday, 05 October 2015 21:04
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Hey Jamie,

I am sorry that delay of this reply,

Regarding with your first question :
>> Nope, because I only added that meta robots in your Easysocial user profile page, other page will not affected.

Regarding with your second question :
>> May i know this member "xxxx" is it joined your site community long time ago?
>> By the way, may i know what you referring on this? (Surely there's no reason why someone's name needs to be shown at the login point?)
>> perhaps you can provide us some screenshot regarding this?
Arlex Wong
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Wednesday, 07 October 2015 00:54
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Hi Arlex

Thanks for confirming that the other pages aren't affected by the robot txt file edit that you made. The member in question (I'd rather not quote her name publicly) joined at the same time as almost all the other members of this site which was when we built it about a year ago. I agree that her details should not be visible at the login point but her name is visible and is being generated by Easy Social - see screenshot.

I'd like to send some of my message as a private posting as it's a bit sensitive and I need to minimise any personal data sharing. In fact it would be helpful if you could edit out the member's name from your last post and then I can remove the screenshots once you've seen them.

Thanks

Jamie
Jamie O'Reilly
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Thursday, 08 October 2015 18:29
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Hey Jamie,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply,

I've already removed your client name and you provided that screenshot at above.

The quickly way to fix this you have to enable lockdown mode from backend Easysocial settings, check my screenshot below.

So public user can't to view any of stream and user profile on your Easysocial site.
Arlex Wong
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Thursday, 15 October 2015 15:36
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Thanks for updating, glad that your issues are resolved now
Mark
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Friday, 16 October 2015 03:45
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