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About this site

The overriding goals of this site are these:

• Provide timely notice to Lost Creek residents regarding activities and items of interest.
• Provide information about Lost Creek and the Lost Creek Neighborhood Association to residents and visitors.
• Provide a convenient way to communicate with residents and LCNA board members without exposing email addresses to spammers.
• Use a simple, intuitive navigation structure.
• Keep the cost down.

To implement the site, we have used the following techniques:

• Most of the information displayed on the site is contained in a database on the site, with the pages generated at the time they are displayed.
  • Announcements can be deleted automatically after a specified time.
  • We can display a directory of residents on demand, and only to verified residents.
• Parts of the site not intended for visitors require logging in.
  • Spammers cannot harvest email addresses.
  • Visitors can still see parts of the site and communicate with LCNA board members.
• Information on the site is maintained using a number of forms on the site.
  • Residents can update their profile when information changes.
  • Email can be sent without displaying email aliases, such as president@lcna.com, etc.
  • Residents can post job notices, lost-and-found notices, etc., without intervention by the webmaster

Membership Directory

Another major aim of the site is to make it easier to maintain the directory of information about Lost Creek Residents. The database contains a record for each resident listing information such as name, address, job, etc. The intent is that this should be the only source of information on the LCNA Members, used for mailings, mass e-mail, recording dues payment, etc. The information is used to display the directory of members.

Privacy concerns

Obviously, with this information online, privacy becomes a serious concern. We have addressed this issue in several ways:

• The site does not contain any pages that can be viewed directly. All pages on the site, even this one, are generated by a program called PHP. This means that we can check to see if the member is authorized to see the page before displaying it.
• We have set up a robust password system. There are two aspects to this:

1. We have a password generator that can construct over 400 billion different passwords. The passwords are variable in length and include both capital and lower case letters as well as numbers and special characters. That makes them quite difficult to guess.
2. The passwords are not stored on the site. Instead, only an encrypted version of the password is stored. To check the password, the user’s entry is encrypted, and checked against the stored encrypted version. That means that even if someone should manage to steal the database, the passwords themselves would not be compromised.
• Only members are allowed to view the directory. Each individual user can request to be excluded from the directory by checking the appropriate box on the Profile page.

Cautions

No system today can be considered truly secure. In spite of these precautions, it may still be possible for someone to break into the site. For this reason, the site will not store any really sensitive information, such as credit numbers. If someone breaks into the site, it may result in more spam appearing in your inbox, but that should be about all. Also, you can change your password. If you do, try to make the password something hard to guess, not your mother’s maiden name, favorite pet, or whatever.

No e-mail addresses are shown to the public

Unfortunately, well-meaning efforts to communicate, such as listing e-mail addresses for the steering committee members, result in great quantities of spam for those whose addresses appear. This includes seemingly innocuous addresses such as webmaster@lcna.com, which received so much spam we had to close down that address. On this site, there are no e-mail addresses shown. Instead, e-mail can be sent by filling out a form. That sends the e-mail to the right person without revealing the address.

For those of you who are curious, the following tools were used:

• Commercial products: Macromedia DreamWeaver, for the page layout, and AlphaButton 2, for the buttons used in the navigation bar and other places.
• Open source products: PHP, a page generation processor, and MySQL, a relational database system