This was added via the software release on 24 January 2020. This was formerly released as ‘whitelisted domains’ and has been modified to ‘allowed domains’ via Release 3.59 in September 2020.
In your Account Preferences, there is an option to set Allowed Domains. Allowed domains means that your pages will only load on the base URLs you place here. If you leave this setting blank, no modification will occur and any appropriate domain will work.
How does it work?
For example, if you have set up a Base URL for your pages which is action.mycharity.org, rather than the default e-activist.com, then your pages can load using either URL.
That is, the same page will display whether using action.mycharity.com/page/00000/petition/1 or e-activist.com/page/00000/petition/1.
However, if you edit the allowed domain setting by adding the domain “action.mycharity.org” to it, then only action.mycharity.com/page/00000/petition/1 will work. The e-activist.com version will show a page “Not found”.
Why is this useful?
We have found that spammers are using the sequential nature of Engaging Networks URLs to use automated processes to discover new pages to enter spam into. By allowing your domain, this is blocking their attempts to use e-activist.com to do so. When they get to “your” page number, the page will not load and their attempts will be thwarted.
How to use this setting
Go to Hello menu > Account Settings, then on the left menu, go to Account Preferences. The setting is called Allowed Domains. Enter your domain, or domains, on individual lines (press enter between each domain).
When entering your domain, you do not have to include https://. Just the domain itself is enough to allow it, for example:
action.mycharity.org donate.mycharity.org
If you have more than one subdomain, you should include each. Just adding the top-level domain, e.g. mycharity.org, would not allow action.mycharity.org.
It is recommended to not include our default domains e-activist.com, us.e-activist.com or netdonor.net to avoid the issues outlined above.
To apply your changes, save the settings page and confirm that your pages load as expected.
Be careful!
If you decided to get an SSL certificate some time after starting your Engaging Networks account, you might have initially promoted pages using our default domain, and then via your new domain.
Adding an allowed domain setting will mean that the default domain will no longer load your pages, so be sure that you haven’t published any links using the old format.
Please test your live pages to ensure they all load.