U.OSU FAQs

Because U.OSU is powered by Wordpress, a great deal of the work is already done for you. However, you should still take the time and patience to maintain accessibility standards when creating your content. See the Wordpress Accessibility guide for some helpful tips for maintaining these standards. Some Wordpress users have also built a community around improving accessibility within the site and have started a blog called "Make Wordpress Accessible".

Understanding how "deleting" a site works

U.OSU allows you the option to delete your site (Tools > Delete Site). However, this option will not permanently delete your site. Instead, the site remains in an archived state.

What this means: all users are removed and it disappears from your list of sites. Yet, the site still exists and can be re-activated by the eLearning Support team. For this reason, the site URL cannot be re-used.

Deleted sites can be retrieved if needed, assuming a "purge" of deleted sites hasn't taken place. Contact u@osu.edu if you need a site retrieved.

Removing a site owned by someone else

If you are not the owner of the site, we recommend that you ask the site owner to remove you from the list of users.

Alternatively, you can hide the site from your drop-down list of My Sites, though the site will remain visible on the larger My Sites page.

1. On the My Sites page, for each site in which you are a member, there is a Hide this blog in Admin Bar checkbox.
2. Check that box.
3. Click the Save button at the top of the page.

Those sites will no longer be visible in the drop-down My Sites menu.

Removing a site owned by you

If the site in question is a system-generated lastname.# account (u.osu.edu/lastname.#), it should not be deleted. That site is linked to your user account; therefore, deleting the personal site makes it impossible for you to login to U.OSU. The eLearning Support team would need to delete your account in order for you to gain access again to U.OSU. If the site is one you created it can be deleted without affecting your account, but you can also take one of the following steps if you want to preserve your content.

• Instead of deleting the site, you might hide it from view. Someone with Admin access to a site can set it to be hidden, but the sites would still show up on the My Sites list for everyone who is listed as a member.
   
• Likewise, you can also hide the site from your drop-down list of My Sites, though the site will remain visible on the larger My Sites page.
  1. On the My Sites page, for each site in which you are a member, there is a Hide this blog in Admin Bar checkbox.
  2. Check that box.
  3. Click the Save button at the top of the page.
      

• Those sites will no longer be visible in the drop-down My Sites menu. If you are positive you will not need the URL or site information, and it is not your personal site, you can delete it using Tools > Delete Site, effectively archiving your site.

The first step is to turn off the option to have your site indexed by search engines or to make you site private. These options are part of your privacy settings.

Once you have updated these settings, you may still need to contact Google and ask them to re-index your site to remove it from searches. See Google's Remove your personal information from Google post for step-by-step instructions.

Note that if you have turned off the option to have your site indexed and then changed your mind and turned it back on, it may take several weeks (at least) before Google's indexes will recognize your site as being findable.

It is important to be mindful of the roles you give users on your site. If you add a user as an administrator, you are granting full ownership rights to him/her. This means that if he/she deletes the site and/or its content, they can do so. For this reason, we recommend having only one administrator per blog. The list below describes all possible user roles at U.OSU.

Administrator - An administrator has full and complete ownership of a site, and can do absolutely everything. This person has complete power over posts/pages, comments, settings, theme choice, import, users and everything else. Nothing is off-limits, including deleting the entire site.

Editor - An editor can view, edit, publish and delete any posts/pages, moderate comments, manage categories, manage tags, manage links and upload files/images.

Author - An author can edit, publish and delete their posts, as well as upload files/images. Authors do not have access to modify, add, delete or publish pages.

Contributor - A contributor can edit their posts but cannot publish them. When a contributor creates a post, it will need to be submitted to an administrator for review. Once a contributor's post is approved by an administrator and published, however, it may no longer be edited by the contributor. A contributor does not have the ability to upload files/images.

Subscriber - Your subscribers are the people who have signed up to receive updates each time you publish new content. They do not have any editing privileges. If your site is public, anyone can follow it, but you may want to send out invitations to specific people who you'd like to share your site with.

The short answer is, no. When you graduate or leave the employment of the university, your personal name.# becomes inactive. At the end of each term near graduation, U.OSU will reach out to remind students of this and provide instructions for how they can export their U.OSU content to a personal WordPress account that is not associated with the university. Users are also able to fully deactivate their sites at any point before graduation if they so choose.

Sites that are not exported will still be viewable and remain live for 3 years, after which point they will automatically be archived. Within this 3 year time frame, users can contact the IT Service Desk or u@osu.edu if they would like to have their site exported to their personal WordPress account or deactivated.