As the year draws to a close, we want to share something special with you. Here at iDiaspora we are always striving to make our community a safe, comfortable, and inspiring space for our users. So we are very happy to introduce some new features that will help you to engage in the community with confidence.

The first feature is a new set of privacy options that allows you to control what information you share and who you share it with. With this new feature, you can not only select whether or not specific information is shared but what categories of community members can see what information. Currently, iDiaspora has four categories of registered users as follows: individuals, organizations, businesses, and government authorities, in addition to the 'public' which represent nonregistered visitors to the site. Now you decide if you want to share your information with all categories only some or even none at all. These different categories also have different defaults for their privacy setting as outlined below:

• For users registering as businesses, organizations, or government all information is open to all of user categories by default.
• For users registering as individuals default setting vary by the type of information as follows: ‘Personal Information’ is open to all user categories by default, ‘Contact Information’ is open to Individuals and Organizations by default, and Professional Profile is open to Individuals, Organizations, and Businesses by default.

To adjust these settings please go to your user profile and click on the ‘Edit’ tab. Once in the Edit screen click the ‘Privacy settings’ tab and feel free to adjust your setting as you see fit.   

The second new feature is user recommendations. This feature allows you to recommend other community members which you know or have worked with so others know that they are a trusted contact. You can recommend other community members by clicking the star by their photo when you are viewing the user profile. The number of recommendations a community member has received can be seen on their profile picture when exploring the community, making it easier to find people you want to work with. So please feel free and go recommend all the iDiaspora community members you know!