A private store is a place on GeoHazardWatch that belongs to you. Pages and files you keep there are yours alone: nobody else can open them, find them in a search, or see their titles — administrators included.
Your first private page creates your own store, called default. Your site may offer others, each for a different purpose, and an encrypted one is set up deliberately — see below.
Tick Private when you edit a page. The page moves into your default store, and its address changes to show where it now lives:
/private/your-name/default/Shopping list
Untick the box and the page goes back to being an ordinary page that everyone can read. Only you can move your own page either way.
Your private pages are listed under Private Pages on your profile. They never appear in the site's page index, recent changes, or anyone else's search.
| Plain store | Encrypted store | |
|---|---|---|
| Who can open it | Only you | Only you |
| How it is protected | By this site refusing everyone else | By encryption, unlocked with your password |
| If someone reads the disk directly | They can read your pages | They see scrambled text only |
A plain store is enough for a shopping list. An encrypted store suits medical notes, financial records, or anything you would mind being read if the server itself were copied.
Whether a store is encrypted is decided when the store is offered to you. You cannot change an existing store from one to the other.
Your site decides which stores it offers, and where it puts the link to set one up — often on your profile. Following that link walks you through a short door:
The store is only created at the last step. If the words do not match, nothing is created and nothing is kept.
The words are shown once. They are not stored anywhere, and nobody at this site has a copy — not the administrator, not the person who runs the server.
They are the only way back into an encrypted store if you forget your password. On the sign-in page, choose Forgot your password? Use your recovery words: type your username, the twelve words and a new password. Your encrypted pages stay readable, and the same twelve words keep working afterwards.
An encrypted store opens when you sign in with your password, and closes when you sign out.
If you signed in another way, you will see a notice that your store is locked, with a link to unlock it. Typing your password there opens it for the rest of that visit.
You can also unlock it with your twelve words instead of your password: on the unlock page, choose Use your 12 recovery words instead and type them in order. Capitals and extra spaces do not matter.
While a store is locked, its pages simply are not there: they do not appear in lists or searches, and opening one directly says the page does not exist.
Ordinary links, like [Shopping list], always mean a public page.
To link to a private page, put the store in front of it:
[default/Shopping list]
The link works for you and shows the store's name. To anyone else it leads nowhere — it does not tell them whether such a page exists.
While you type [ in the editor, your own private pages are offered alongside public ones, marked private and showing which store they are in. Choosing one inserts the right link.
Search covers your own private pages, including those in an encrypted store, by title and by the words in them. A private result's address begins with /private/, which is how you can tell it apart.
Nobody else's search reaches your private pages, whatever they search for.
Deleting a private page moves it into your own store's trash, with its history.
My Trash on your profile lists what you have deleted, and lets you:
Your site clears trash automatically after a time it sets — thirty days unless an administrator changes it. For an encrypted store that housekeeping happens while you are signed in, because the site cannot open the store otherwise.
Restoring is refused if you have since made another page with the same title in that store. Rename one of them and try again.
A file you attach to a private page is kept in the same store as the page, and is as private as the page. In an encrypted store the file's contents are encrypted too.
The same file uploaded to a private store and to a public page stays two separate copies, so a private upload never shares a record with a public one.
Nothing in the site shows an administrator what is in your store. They cannot open it, list what is in it, read a page or a file, search it, or restore anything from your trash. Asking for one of your private pages tells them only that the page does not exist — the same answer they get for a page that was never written.
Someone with access to the server's disk is a different matter. In a plain store they can read your pages there; in an encrypted store they find only scrambled text.
An administrator can delete your account, which deletes what you kept.
Two things people reasonably expect are not built:
Until they are, treat an encrypted store as a place you can write and read, but not yet hand to anyone or take with you.