I have today published some changes to the way Private Areas are created and administered, with the aim of making them simpler to understand and use.

The main changes are that:

• The admin pages of the Private Area are stripped down to just Content and Reports - everything else is managed in the admin pages for the main website.
• Membership of the Private Area is managed through the main site's Users & Permissions / Membership pages.
• Users opt-in for emails just once, which covers all email/notification from the site and all members' areas. There is no longer separate opt-in for your main site and for the Private Area. As an administrator you are now able to change the opt-in status of individual users.
• To join the Private Area, Users request to join the main site as normal (or are invited by an admin). Once joined the admin can choose whether or not to add them to the Private Area. To add them, just add them to the appropriate members group as you would with any other group on the Members page.
• You can now specify Private Area Members in the pop-down list of recipients when sending email, and on Permissions pages.
• Admins of the main website become admins of the Private Area too (this was always the case but now it's clearer!).
• You can now create more than one Private Area per website, should you want one for general members, one for committee members, etc.
• By default, new Private Areas are now called Members' Area when created - though this can be changed.

I have added a bit more about how to use the Private Members' Area in the documentation pages here.

Thanks

Joe - Voice Admin