The SNO Report: We’ve got your back this school year

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We hope you had a great summer! Whether you’re a brand-new adviser or a website pro, SNO wants to offer you an enthusiastic welcome back. We’ve got some great new features and updates to make you the rockstar of your journalism program this year.

You’ve got a lot to deal with as a journalism adviser and teacher, and one of the last things you want to worry about is website security.  But one of the realities of websites is that they can get hacked when users fail to use strong password practices.

With that in mind, we’ve just released an update to our FLEX theme that will help make your site more secure.  There are three main components to our latest security update.

  1. While WordPress has a strength meter on its password field, it still allows your users to create weak passwords.  We’ve added a measure on the password reset process that will prevent weak passwords from being used.  While our new setting doesn’t require crazy ultra-secure passwords, it will now require that a password will have lowercase and uppercase letters, a number, and meet a minimum length requirement.
  2. We’ve added a mechanism that will require a password change every 180 days.  When your password is nearing expiration, you will receive a notice in your dashboard to change your password.  If your password expires, you can use the password reset option on the login screen to regain access, or you cancontact the SNO support team to help you regain access.
  3. We’ve also added a mechanism to thwart brute force hacking attempts.  If any user account on your site has more than 10 failed login attempts from any particular IP address, that account will no longer be able to log in from that IP address for the rest of the day.  If one of your students accidentally triggers this lockout, you can click on Locked Accounts under the Users tab to quickly unlock their account and help them regain access.

This FLEX update is currently available — you can get this update by following theupdate link in the red bar at the top of your dashboard.  Within a week, we’ll be automatically pushing this update out to all sites that have not yet updated.

Unlimited support (as always!)
As you start the new school year, don’t forget that the SNO support team is here to help in any way we can.  You can reach us via live chat at snosites.com between the hours of 8 am to 5 pm CDT.  You can also reach the support team by phone at 855.543.9766 x1 during those same hours.  And, as always, you can send an email any time to [email protected] and we will help you as soon as we can.

At SNO, we’re not just your web host, we’re your partner in publishing, and we want to do everything we can to make your life easier.