Family Blog

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  topcat1953 · Member · Mar 17, 2022 at 6:38 pm

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  I just sent a password protected post to my family which started a conversation about creating a family blog.

  Looking at the privacy settings, it seems that only users or readers with a WordPress account would be able to see a private blog. It would not be practical to password protect every post. We want the blog to be private but accessible.

  Not every family member wants to bother setting up a WordPress account but they want to be able to see the posts and comment. That means it would have to be public.

  I can’t figure out how to maintain both privacy and accessibility without simply sharing my username and password with the whole family. Is that even workable? So I would make the blog private, and the family would log in with my credentials. That makes me a bit uneasy because any one of them could then do something crazy like deleting the whole blog.

  Any suggestions?

  WP.com: Yes
  Correct account: Yes

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  staff-sheva · Staff · Mar 17, 2022 at 7:53 pm

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  Hi @topcat1953,

  I don’t recommend sharing your WordPress.com account credentials with anyone, including your family.

  My best recommendation here is that you make the site private, and then invite your family members as viewers — they won’t have access to your site besides viewing and commenting on it.

  You mentioned that not all family members want WordPress.com accounts, though I think this is the most practical way to do this. If anyone were to share an account and then change the password, others would get locked out regardless.

  Hope that helps.

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  topcat1953 · Member · Mar 17, 2022 at 8:38 pm

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  Hello, again. I just found this thread about inviting viewers:
  https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/inviting-viewers-1/

  The way I understand it, then, is that I can invite family members to view the private blog but they still have to have a WordPress account.

  It’s a huge family so I don’t think it would be practical to ask everyone to open an account. A few have already said no, but they still would like to see the blog. If I proceed further, it may cause a family feud. Especially if a lot of them are locked out.

  I don’t see a viable solution.

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  staff-totoro · Staff · Mar 17, 2022 at 9:41 pm

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  That is correct, for the highest security you would have each “viewer” create their own account. It’s not a requirement, but it is our recommendation.

  If you wish to share account info with others that is your choice as a site owner. My recommendation would be to set up a separate account for the family members that want to “view” the site, but have no need to access it as an administrator (to write content, manage the site, etc.)

  You can do that by first signing out of your @topcat1953 account and then create a second account here: https://wordpress.com/start/account/user/

  Once you have created the second account, you can log back in as @topcat1953 and then invite the new account you created as a “Viewer” when you follow the steps here: https://wordpress.com/support/user-roles/#adding-users-to-your-site

  Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.