Unpublished Site Wall

SocialStack has a built in block wall which indicates that a site is not published yet. This is not a security feature and instead has the primary goal of ensuring that a search engine like Google does not flag the live version of the site as a phishing site. That can happen as it sees two identical sites on different domains and the stage site gets classified as the true original because it existed before the live one did. It can also be used to hide a live website before it is fully ready.

What it blocks

• The block wall will only block the UI of the website, not the API. I.e. you can still login via posting a username and password to the /v1/user/login endpoint.
• It does not block logged in administrator users.

Configuring the block wall

Login as an administrator and go to the configuration section of the administration panel (/en-admin/configuration/). From there, look for the configuration for HtmlService and in there is two configuration options for the block wall: a password to use and a date string (ISO 8601) indicating when the block wall should expire automatically.

The active until date is optional. If it is not specified, the block wall will be present so long as a password is configured.

{
  "BlockWallPassword": "hello",
  "BlockWallActiveUntil": "2022-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Source location

The block wall is part of the Pages module and specifically exists in the HtmlService.cs file. As of the time of writing the code block is located here. In the event that the code has moved, try a ctrl+f for "GenerateBlockPage" in HtmlService.cs instead.