Access Restrictions
This is about why a lot of the content on the site is restricted. If you're a guest and clicked something you were interested in, you may have been redirected to a page explaining it, and there are two main points.
First, it's legal. As an unincorporated association (UA) that's a private membership (PMA as many people know it) you're supposed to engage the public only in limited ways. If you claim to be private but you're fully engaging the public, you open yourself up to public scrutiny and to scrutiny from public agencies, which is antithetical to what you're trying to do as a PMA. There's a walk-the-walk element here: you keep things behind a wall for the people in your membership, who all sign an agreement, and that's one element of what makes it protected by law. So it protects the organization and the members who want to come here and speak, share, and participate.
Second, AI scraping. It's very easy now for bots and AI agents to scrape a whole site and take the content, and honestly it's not just AI - there are people in the freedom community who copy and paste other people's work, and that can get people hurt. There's also the surveillance side: AI profiling, where someone scrapes your entire site to build a position and assess you against whatever they consider the rules at the time.
As for telling what you can access - we try to be as transparent as possible. On our page explaining why some items are restricted there's a section, "the access icons explained." We put those icons on content to show what role you need. You'll see them in content lists - search results, the blog, lessons - placed so you can spot them. Some content just needs a confirmed email address, so we know you're a real account; that's not even members-only. Other content is for Sojourner members, and so on.
On the search page there's also a filter: pick a membership type, like Awakened, and you'll see everything available to them, including the confirm-your-email items, since an Awakened member can see those. The media library uses the same icons and has its own filter. And the sitemap lets you filter by role too, so you can scroll through the content and see what's available to each membership type or role.
We know that not being able to see all the content is one of the hardest parts for guests, or for anyone trying to figure out whether a membership is right for them, and it can be frustrating. There's a line to walk between keeping things private and protecting the organization, and being open to new members. If you ever have a question about a piece of content, reach out to support. The content is private for protection, but we're more than happy to talk to anybody about it.
00:09
Welcome everybody. In this video, we are going to talk about why much of the content on our website is restricted. And if you're a guest and you found something you were interested in and you clicked on it, there's a chance you've been redirected to this page here explaining why it is. And I'm not going to go too much into the why, but I will touch lightly on the two most important points. First and foremost, being that as an unincorporated association that's a private membership, a PMA as many people know it, you are supposed to engage the public in limited ways.
00:41
If you claim to be private but you're fully engaging the public, it opens you up to public scrutiny, scrutiny of public agencies. It's a position that it's antithetical to what you're actually trying to do as a PMA. The second is there's a bit of walking the walk when it comes to this. You want to keep things behind a wall for the people in your membership who you all sign a membership, you agree on certain things, and that's what makes this protected by law.
01:10
So it's about protecting the organization as well as the members who wish to come here and speak, share, participate in the community. The second one is AI scraping, I guess let's call it that. With the advent of AI, it's very easy for bots, AI agents, to come and scrape your website of all its content, steal it, and honestly it's not just the AI we're worried about.
01:36
There's a lot of people in the freedom community that will just copy and paste other people's work, and it can actually result in a lot of people getting hurt. And then there's the actual surveillance side of AI or AI profiling, where if they're using AI to scrape your entire website and try to get a position, assess you against the database of whatever they deem to be the rules at the time. So it gives us privacy in multiple ways. So the privacy thing is very important and I'm just going to walk you through how to tell what kind of content you can access on the website.
02:21
When it comes to what people can access on the website, we do try to be as transparent as possible about what people can access, and if you scroll down on this page, we have this area, so the access icons explained. We use these icons on content to try to let people know what type of role you need to have to be able to access. So you'll find this in lists of content, and we also have ways to be able to search or filter content so that you know what each different type of role can see.
02:55
When you are looking at a list of content like this, here we have just some search results, but it's very similar for the blog, for our lessons. When we have lists of content, we'll usually put those icons somewhere so that you can see them. So here you can see you just have to have confirmed your email address. So this isn't even necessarily for members, just you confirm your email address, we know you're a real account, and then you can access it. So here's for Sojourner members.
03:21
So we use these icons so that if you are browsing the content, you can hopefully tell whether or not you'll have access to it. And in addition to that, on the search page here, we do have the ability to filter. So you can use this to filter. So if you want to see what's available to Awaken members, you can use that and then you can see everything that is available to Awaken members. So you'll see that this one requires you to confirm your email. An Awaken member can see that so it shows up in the list.
03:52
In our media library, we use the same icons. So here you can see the icons. If you're on a desktop, you can hover over these and see that. And we also have another way to filter here. So here you can see each icon. So you can use this to filter the content and find out what's available to each membership type. And another spot where you can use some type of filter to see what's available to each membership type or just role on our site map. So here you can see you can choose what's available to somebody that confirmed their email, what's available to anyone. So you can scroll through the content here and use these filters to see what type of stuff is available to each membership type or just role generally speaking.
04:41
It's not just for members. So that is the short and sweet of it of why we restrict some content and how you can tell what is restricted. We know that especially for guests or people trying to figure out if a membership is right for them, not being able to see all of the content can be one of the hardest parts, maybe sometimes frustrating for people. So that's why we're making videos like this.
05:07
We're trying to be transparent. There is a line that you have to walk so that you keep things private, you protect your organization, but also you want to be open to new members. So hopefully this video helped you understand. For anybody that ever has a question about some content, you can always reach out to support. We've got the link right up here in the top right. So you can drop us a line whenever you want, whenever you have a question. We keep the content private for protection, but we're more than happy to talk to anybody about it. So hope this helped and thanks for staying through to the end.
Comments
