Northbayhikes.com

Security and Privacy Policies

It's a fine balancing act between sharing your personal information with a group of friends, and perhaps sharing a bit more than usual with friends of friends who you don't know very well. Everyone has a different comfort level, so we've designed the site to share only what you choose to share.

Members Only = No Spam

Event and user information is only available to be viewed by other members of this site. Because this site is written from scratch, nasty automated programs that search the web don't know how to enter. This keeps us fairly safe from spam. The question then becomes how much information do you want to share with other members, some of whom you haven't met. We hope you choose to keep an open mind and share your interests and pictures. This is a community and will only thrive if we choose to make it work.

Limit sharing with share_info and share_organizer settings

Obviously, if you don't enter any information, it can never be shared. This can be a problem - if you sign up for an event, and it gets cancelled at the last minute, we won't be able to contact you and you can waste a bunch of time. If your primary email account is lost, we'll have to disable or delete your account. If you don't share any contact information, friends you meet during the hike or other event will not be able to find you later. Often this is nice to share photos and/or plan other events.

To limit sharing the right information with the right people, you have a few settings you can change.

Share Info: Defines what information can be shared with all other members.
Share Organizer: Defines what information can only be shared with people allowed to organize events. This is limited to just a few people, who have joined us on several events and we've learned to trust. We've met them in person. For example, you may wish to deny other members to see your phone numbers, but provide it to organizers so they can call you if changes occur.
Admins: 2-3 people handle all email communication on bounced emails and questions. These people have been with us over 10 years, and are listed on the contact us page. They can read/change/fix any user setting.

The values for the share settings define access to a bunch of user settings. These are defined below.

Sharing = None

If no sharing values are set, you will not show up in the member listing. You will be invisible to all other users. You'll still get email invitations. However, if you sign up for an event, your name will be visible for everyone to see. They will not be able to select your name nor view any profile information.

Sharing Table

When you edit your settings, you can set share_info and share_organizer to a number of field groupings. Each column in this table corresponds to one of these groups. Enabling that group makes those fields visible to the selected people. For more info on each field, please see the help icon on the settings page.

Field	always	name	email	im	phone	all	never/admin only
login		x
full name		x
web site		x
favorite activity		x
picture		x
small_picture	x
description		x
creation_date		x
last_modify_date		x
groups		x
email			x
filter_email			x
email_format			x
alternate email							x
home phone					x
mobile phone					x
pager					x
yahoo IM account				x
MSN IM account				x
AOL IM account				x
Other IM account settings (keys)							x
gender						x
activity						x
carpool						x
weekday times						x
saturday times						x
hike miles						x
hike elevation						x
horse time						x
helpers						x
account_status						x
comments							x
mailing address							x
password							x
home_style							x
auto_slideshow							x
slideshow_delay							x
preload_images							x
auths							x
exit_reason							x
exit comments							x
change history							x
share info							x
share organizer							x

This is a community, and we're always open to suggestions and improvements! If you would like additional fields or field groups, let us know!