For a while now we’ve enabled privacy options for your blog because we understand that not everyone wants everything out there. Tonight, we’ve decided to take that a step further.
If you go to your Dashboard, click Options and then Privacy, you will see a new set of options. You used to just be able request for your blog to be unlisted in search engines and such. Now you can also choose to protect your blog so only WordPress.com members you choose can have access to it.
All you have to do is choose the protected blog option, then add the usernames of the folks you want to have access to your blog. Everyone else who tries to visit your blog will get a message saying they need to be a member to have access. We currently are limiting protected blogs to 5 members while we test out the system.
Give it a go and let us know what you think. Also remember, you don’t have to do this to your main blog, you can always create another for the more sensitive or private topics. (You can have as many blogs as you fancy.)
WordPress.com News 
impressive
excelent! In fact I do have a “protected” blog, and the available options were in fact insuficcient. But now, you are responding to a user need, and thats very good. I will certainly explore those new options…
Great feature!
cool step forward
Thats cool. But where is the section for custom HTML and CSS?!?! Man if WordPress had that, I would acctually throw a small party!
Really nice features!
Great..!
Nice! Now pls let me edit my page too 🙂
Good feature for private blogging
Cool beans. Thanks.
thanks
that’s great
When you say five members…does that mean the amount of people that we can choose to acces a private blog? Or do you mean the guinea pigs available for your pleasure?
cool 😎
Nice. Life at WordPress just keeps getting better and better. Advertising (most hopefully and soon). Privacy. CSS customization. With all that, I may well have to reconsider my recent decision to move my blog elsewhere.
Awesome!
The privacy issue is a difficult one for which there seems no solution. We want to share our diaries with the world, but are at the same time afraid that things would be read by the wrong people.
It seems that WordPress has been doing some thinking on this. Great!
Nice option – I think privacy of blogs will become a much larger issue as blogging becomes mainstream.
Great! Thank you!
sounds excellent. I’m certainly going to try it out.
very cool, wordpress rocks
great feature – just what we needed as we set up this blog – when will it increase to more than 5 users? Ideally at least 20 would be great.
I like it. This makes my life much better. The “protected document” was very unsatisfying.
The very reason I joined WordPress….to have the option
Much obliged, folks.
This particular choice is going to be most useful.
Kind regards, as always.
-Solo.
I like this feature a lot. Thank you! 🙂
We’ve been waiting for this option for a while, as we want to use a blog for our church that has access to church members only with some sensitive info. When will it be available with access for a lot more users? Thanks for the change.
We haven’t decided what to do for folks who want a ton of users on it yet. It may be free up to a point and then paid for unlimited users.
Thanks for this option. Great!
That’s great, really!
I joined WP just an hour ago just to use a plugin. Eventually I couldn’t use it so I needed another solution. This is great! But what will it cost if there should be a fee on it?
Having been looking forward to this feature for a few months, I was really pleased to discover that it had arrived… but then disappointed to find that, in its current implementation, it’s not what I want after all. 😦
I’d like to post regular updates and photos of my baby boy for family and friends to see (rather than emailing them around), but I’d also like to password-protect the site so the photos don’t end up who-knows-where.
However, I have somewhat more than five family members and friends, and none of them are WordPress.com users, so the current implementation is next to useless for me. 😦 Not that it doesn’t have appplications, certainly, but it’s not what I’d call a “password protected blog”. I’d like to be able to email a group of people with a link to the blog and a note saying, “The password will be ‘babyblog’ until further notice. Come back and see how he’s developing as often as you like.”
Is a solution to my problem likely to appear soon at WordPress.com, as a free or a paid option?
PS Just so the post doesn’t sound like I’m doing nothing but moaning, I’ve got three WP.com blogs and I like the platform and the site; my disappointment is only with this one feature, which was promised and which wasn’t what I’d hoped for.
great feature. this just brought me back from vox.
one more thing to make sure that i stay here: more specificity.
for some posts, i’d like to allow users A, B & C to have access. for others, user C only. and for still others, have it open to the full world.
what is the plan for providing such granular, post-by-post privacy control?
thanks again.
I’ve just hit this as a need for a new (private) blog I want to set up for the folk I work with – about 10 of us, which is too many for the current set up.
What are the current plans for increasing the number of users of a private blog? If you’re wanting a revenue stream, something like 10 credits per 10 users per year would work for me 😉 …free would be even nicer though, but I appreciate that you have to earn your crust.
Thanks
I like the sound of this feature – I use (and love) WordPress already and now want to set up a private blog for the 8-10 people I work with.
So – i’m just wondering if there are any plans for lifting the 5-user limit?
Thanks.
Im just wondering if there is any way to contact with the adminstrator of the protected weblog.
I wish that checking the box to prevent being listed in search engines also worked to not show up in ask.com. I suppose that is an issue in how ask.com culls data.
Yes, ask.com is a search engine.
I realize ask.com is a search engine. However, blogs that have had that box checked since their inception still show in up search results at ask.com. I’ve gotten referrals from them at least a couple times.
I have to imagine whatever their method is to find pages bypasses the script or markup that other spiders ignore.
Thank you very much. This is what I missed up to now.
Do users get the ability to edit the initial public page on a private blog? I noticed it points here and has a big wordpress logo. I actually wouldn’t have expected it to be like that for some reason.
hmm i like this
Does this only work for people who have a WordPress user name and password? What about Grandma and Grandpa?
Great feature, and it is absolutely necessary for certain blogs. Take for example a restricted group of researchers who work on a scientific subject in different countries in the world; they may find this option very useful, each of them can enter the site(blog) and add to it his findings and make discussions. Please, take in consideration to allow it for a good number of users.