Serious problem with password protected posts

  • Unknown's avatar
    silverfox183 · Member ·

    Hi this is related to legal matters and also law enforcement, so it is important.

    I have a WordPress site. I also have a forum on that site that is password protected with various different passwords. We use that forum to try to solve a famous US double murder case that happened last year. We are the largest site on the web for discussing that case. There are separate passwords for every post on the site.

    Also you have to pay $20 to get access to the passwords. So the site is very well locked down. It has to be because we discuss all sorts of people, US citizens who are walking around, and we often suspect or even accuse them of various crimes. We also share all sorts of private data that we dig up on these people. We went private and pay mostly to avoid harassment, libel, and defamation suits.

    Behind the password paywall, we can say anything we want about anyone because it’s not accessible to the general public so there’s no case for libel or defamation. It’s like if you gather a group of people into your house. You can say anything you want about anyone and there’s no libel or defamation because no one can hear you.

    The problem is that the text in my posts and the 10,000 comments on them so far are all protected for search spiders, so none of that private material shows up in Google Search. However, all of the photos and captions I posted can be found on Google image search if you look for the right things. I assume this is because the images are on a different server, maybe the image server, than the password post. So the images end up being completely unprotected.

    One of the people we suspect of committing these murders has somehow searched Google image search and found our images. Now he is trying to press charges of harassment against me. It probably will not go anywhere, but it is worrying.

    My question is why are the images not protected too? We want both our images and our text protected behind that password because we are discussing some very private and serious matters concerning all sorts of folks.

    Is there any way that WordPress can protect my images too?

    I am not happy about this at all. :(

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    What is the site’s address? It’s not possible to host a forum or have a paywall on a WordPress.com site unless the site is on the Business Plan, and you only have a free site in your account at http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/ So it sounds like you need help with a site using the open source WordPress software found on WordPress.org instead. That’s something completely separate from WordPress.com.

    If your site is a self-hosted WordPress installation, please ask here for help instead:

    https://wordpress.org/support/

    That said, the issue you’re describing is how the WordPress software works. Password-protecting a post prevents access to the content of the actual post, but images added to the post are not part of the post content. Images are uploaded to the media library and the post merely hotlinks to their location in the library, and password protection of a specific post has no influence on files hosted in the media library.

    The only way to prevent access to media files on WordPress.com is to set the entire site to private. On a self-hosted WordPress site you cannot set the site to private, though there should be plugins you can use to specifically protect the media library or you can also edit the robots.txt file to exclude the media library from being indexed. In the latter case the files will still be accessible, but search engines won’t crawl them.

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