Thanks Peggy, that’s a tough one because it’s due to a bug in Apple’s software which of course, we can’t fix. Other platforms, including the Safari browser in Windows or browsers on regular Mac machines do not have this issue.

iPads and iPhones are not often used to access this site. We could disable the bottom activity bar for everyone, or we could add our voice to the existing request for Apple to fix the problem.

Because this causes a major usability issue for someone with an iPad or iPhone, and because that’s how you are accessing the site (I take it?), for the moment I have disabled the bottom activity bar for everyone. If you would prefer to re-enable it while waiting for Apple, it’s easy to turn back on.

Agreed Andria, I think this is important and will bring it up on the team call tonight. I believe that site developer @BrianGlanz has made it so that group creators have the option make the group private, but he will have to verify. Can you share a link to the Google Alert service you use? I’m sure people here are also interested in learning more about that type of self monitoring as well.

Thanks for the great suggestion. ~Jacob

@caggiano that’s http://www.google.com/alerts

As with the large majority of the Web, the content in JTM Online and JTM Publishing is crawled by search engines by default. There are also many opportunities to use JTM Online or JTM Publishing at varying levels of privacy. If a particular session or blog is not private enough, you can either ask the session or blog administrator to adjust settings, or if the session or blog should also serve public purposes then it might be time to start another, more private session or blog.

Here is more on the current balance of public and private options:

Most of JTM Online and JTM Publishing is viewable by anyone, including search engines, without signing in. To contribute to JTM Online, you must register and log in. To leave a comment on a blog or site, post or page, in JTM Publishing, you usually do not need to log in, but you might need to — that is decided by the administrator of that particular blog or site. By default, any member of the general public i.e. not only JTM members can comment on JTM blog posts.

For anything you create in JTM’s site — a session, a blog, etc. — the default settings are that the content is publicly viewable. When creating a session, blog, or message you also have options for privacy. Messages between one or more members can be public, with an @ symbol like on Twitter, or can be private, more like email.

Sessions / groups have three levels of privacy; they can be public, private, or hidden. If they are private, everyone can see they exist but you cannot see what’s inside unless you are granted permission. If they are hidden, you cannot even see the sessions exist unless you are invited. The level of privacy is set by session administrators.

Blogs / sites have five levels of privacy — fully public, viewable by anyone but not search engines, viewable only by registered and authenticated users, … usually the highest levels of privacy, such as being viewable only by administrators, are only used when a site is early in development.

Within a public blog or site, you can still limit the privacy of just one post, just one page, and so on. BG