What does Hoplr mean with a 'closed' neighbourhood network?

What does 'closed' not mean?

Hoplr is dedicated to maximising its neighbourhoods' safety. Read more about the security of Hoplr, here. 

However, online security starts with responsible use of social media. The risk might be small, but never assume that your posts are only read by well-meaning neighbours. Just like on any other social network, anyone can use a fake e-mail address, profile name and home address.

As such, we cannot guarantee that all members of your Hoplr neighbourhood are actual residents of your neighbourhood. That's not what 'closed' means.

• However, we do discourage people with bad intentions to create fake accounts.
• And we make it very easy for new members to find their one correct neighbourhood. 

So what does 'closed' mean?

'Closed' means that the Hoplr neighbourhood is only accessible to registered members of that specific Hoplr neighbourhood. To be able to view its content, a person has to: 

• Create a Hoplr account
• Enter an address that lies within the neighourhood
• Be accepted by either a member of the Hoplr neighbourhood, the Hoplr team or by use of the neighbourhood code

There is a number of other mechanisms to ward of people with bad intentions in place. But for safety reasons, we do not make these public.

In other words, your Hoplr neighbourhood is inaccessible to: 

• people who don't have an account on Hoplr
• Hoplr users who are not members of your specific Hoplr neighbourhood
• search engines (*)

(*) What is a search engine?

Search engines such as Google and Bing skim or 'crawl' the internet, to provide you with the information you are looking for. 

To organisations, it's a non-stop battle to be at the top of a search page whenever you enter a relevant search query. Because, the higher an organisation is placed on the search page, the more likely it is that you'll visit their website. And that you'll buy, register, book,...

An unimaginable amount of factors determine whether or not an organisation ranks well within a search engine. But this much is true: the more great content a search engine can 'index', the better.

So, often social networks really have to consider: 'How much of our data and content will we be making available to these search engines? Do we prioritise our ranking within search engines or the privacy and security of our users? 

Hoplr prioritises your privacy, always, as is stated in our manifesto. That's why the Hoplr neighbourhoods are closed from search engines.