Community Website
I'm in the process of launching a website to make it easy for people in my condominium community to communicate. The site is http://www.reptonplace.org and I've made the initial decision to enable strong privacy settings.
To accomplish this, I simply signed up for the domain name at www.godaddy.com. They made it easy to sign up for a hosting account and then add the Drupal Content Management Software which makes it trivial for me to let people sign-up for user accounts. Setting up the e-mail forwarding account was a bit tricky because at first I sign-up a real POP3/SMNP e-mail account. After back-tracking and setting up the correct account, I eventually made the discovery that you can't test a forwarding account by sending messages that originate from the destination account from the forwarding address. My guess is about half a dozen messages got picked up by the server spam filter and deleted as they were passing to my forwarding address.
Everything else seems to have gone fine, and I'm quite happy with the Drupal deployment for my reptonplace.org site.
2 Comments:
Very cool. Some considerations I would suggest:
1) Can anyone join, or just actual residents of the building?
2) You ask for their unit number.
a) Do you have any way of verifying this?
b) Do you actually want to verify this?
3) You should add some text about how you plan on treating their private information (won't sell your info, etc)
I think my town back home had an unofficial web site which eventually had to get shut down because it turned ugly, the residents saying horrible things about each other. And they could do this because it was all anonymous.
Will everyone know who everyone else is? Or will only you know that? When they post a message, will it print there name and/or unit number?
> 1. Can anybody join?
I can't think of any specific reason why I'd want to exclude people based on the criteria that they aren't a resident. A good choice for non-residents for the Unit Number question would be "friend/family of (some unit number)" or "not applicable".
> 2a. Can unit numbers be verified?
Names and unit numbers are public information made available through the "doorbell" buzzer system.
> 2b. Is there a desire to verify unit numbers.
No. But there are only 150 or so valid numbers and being able to filter based on some basic criteria has benefit to me. If somebody claims to live in unit "0" or "Asdf" it's a nice red-flag that I should try to follow-up before approving their account.
> 3. Add a privacy information statement.
Good suggestion.
> Unnumbered addition remarks.
Registered users can see what all users have entered for their user account information once they've logged in. Currently the only identifying fields are Unit Number and Homepage (and an Avatar picture). To join, an e-mail address is required but Drupal marks that as "Privacy" and only site administrators (me) can see it. I'm in the process of trying to decide if I want to add more user account options or guidance to create user accounts that are real names.
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