The synagogue website is the public face of the congregation. On the one hand, you want to encourage members to contribute content and to be active on the site. On the other hand, there may be certain guidelines you want everyone to respect. Naturally, the guidelines may differ, depending on your hashkafa (religious philosophy or outlook).
No matter what your approach, there are steps you can take to maintain an active and respectful website.
1. User access levels – ShofarSites allows multiple levels of access.
Public – Anyone visiting your site
Registered User – People who have signed up with your site – chose a username and password, and provided their email address. Many sites allow a public visitor to create a user account. That’s what happens when you go to a website and they won’t let you access certain content until you sign up and log in. However, if you want to limit access, you can also decide not to allow users to register through the website. You can have your web administrator create user accounts and then hand out a user name and password to each person.
Author – An author can submit articles, but they don’t appear on the site until a publisher has approved them.
Editor – An editor can submit articles, and also edit articles that other people write – but they still don’t appear on the site till a publisher has approved them.
Publisher – Can write articles, edit articles, and publish articles on the website.
So, for example, if the youth group would like to submit a monthly column, but you would like to check it over before it appears on the website – you could make the youth group leader an ‘author’.
2. Moderation
One of the fun things about a blog is the comments – people can respond to the ideas and to each other, and a dialogue forms. You can limit comments to registered user, or you can choose to review all comments before they are published on the website. The same applies for a forum – you can choose to have only registered users post, or to have all posts moderated, or to put a particular user in charge of the form and making sure it keeps on topic.