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Your sites are well-protected on OPTe Network. We monitor potentially harmful activity to ensure there is no unauthorized access to your content. To help keep your sites secure there are a few things you can do to protect your data.

Keep your secrets secret

The weakest link in the security of anything you do online is your password. It’s the key to your site, your email, your social networking accounts or any other online service you use. If your password is easy to guess, your online identity is vulnerable.

All it takes is one person to guess your password and they can delete every post you ever made. They could deface your site. They could read you emails or hijack your address and impersonate you. They could ruin what you have taken time to build.

Choose a strong password

Every password you use has to be easy to remember and hard to guess. A random set of numbers and characters make for a hard-to-guess password, but they’re also hard to remember. On the other hand, you’ll probably never forget your birthdate or the name of your first pet, but these make for very bad passwords, as they are increasingly easy to guess or find out.

On OPTe Network, you can use very long password with any combination of letters, numbers, and special characters, so the security of your password – and by extension, of your site – is really up to you. We’ve collected some tips for creating strong passwords.

Instead of trying to keep track of dozens of passwords in your head or in unsecured text documents on your desktop, use password management software. They will lock all your information down behind one single password. If you only have to remember one password, you can make it as random and as hard to guess as you want.

These are some the password managers we use for our own passwords:

  • Keepass – Open Source, free to download and use. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
  • LastPass – Free service with premium option. Available for all major OSs, browsers and mobile devices.
  • 1Password – Paid download. Available for Windows, Mac and iOS, with support for all major browsers.

Log out to prevent public access to your Account

You can protect your account by logging out when you are finished working. This is especially important when you are working on a shared or public computer. If you don’t log out, someone may be able to access your account just by viewing the browser history and going back to your OPTe Network Dashboard.

You can protect your account by signing out when you are finished working.

To log out of your OPTe Network account, click on your Gravatar in the upper right. Then, under your Gravatar click on Sign Out.

Safely share control of your site with other users

OPTe Network provides a rich multi-user platform. While each site has only one owner, you can have as many users as you want – this is ideal for group sites with multiple authors, for magazine-style sites with an editorial workflow, or for any other large site where you want to share some of the administrative load.

However, sharing the load also means sharing the responsibilities. That’s why on OPTe Network, you can set different Roles for each user you add to your site. Roles determine a user’s access level.

The most limited role, Contributor, can only write draft posts, but can’t publish them. Users with an Author role can publish posts and upload images, but can’t touch other users posts. Editorscan not only edit or publish any user’s posts, they can also moderate comments and manage categories and tags. Finally, the Administrator role has full control of the site – they can even delete it.

When adding users, try to find the role that best describes what you want them to do on your site. If you’re setting up an account for a user that only plans to contribute a few posts, make them a contributor. Reserve the Author and Editor roles for trusted users that have a long-term commitment to your site.

Finally, be particularly stingy with the Administrator role. When you make another user an Administrator on your site, you’re literally creating a separate set of keys for your site and handing them to someone else. Not only will they be able to take your site for a joyride,  just having an extra set of keys laying around significantly increases the risk of your site being hijacked.

In fact, we suggest you avoid the Administrator role entirely. In almost all cases, the Editor role would be a better choice.

Read more about this on the support pages for Adding Users and User Roles.