There are 3 ways to have a project hidden from the public:
Unlisted Projects: Disable visibility from the public, but allow participation
Draft folders: using draft folder to keep projects hidden
Preview Link: Disable visibility from the public, allow the project to remain in draft, used for testing purposes
Unlisted Projects
By default a project is set as "Listed". This means it will appear on the platform front office, as a normal project where only the access rights and visibility rights from the project/phase settings will impact the way the project appears to the end-user.
When you "Unlist" a project, it is now no longer visible to the public on the front office, and the only way to access it, is by receiving the URL to the project. There is no other way to navigate towards the project. Therefore it will also no longer be part of the homepage and widgets that include project visibility.
An unlisted project will also not be indexed by google and cannot be found by searching on a search engine.
This feature is used to allow Admins and Project Managers to have a project that is only accessible to a target group of users. You can find the toggle to enable or disable listing in the 'General' tab of the project (see image)
Note: You can both list and unlist a project at any time.
Draft folders
If you need to make a folder with projects in it hidden and accessible with a URL the only way is by using this workaround: Keeping the folder in "Draft" and publishing projects within it
Create a folder and add the projects in it.
keep the folder on "draft" but put the project on "publish" so participation is open
Share the URL of the project to the people
Since the folder is on "draft", the projects in it will not appear on the homepage. Therefore you will only be able to know it exists if you have the URL link directly to it. If you keep the access rights of the project is "none", we have now created a situation where only people with a specific URL has access to participate to a project without registration.
Downsides to take into consideration:
1. if you know the title of the project you can still find it in the search project function on the platform
2. Do not add any area tags/ topic tags to the project or residents that follow these tags will recieve email notification that a "new project was published"
3. events associated to this project will show up in the events page
Preview Links
Preview links are used to share projects with other administrators or project managers to share a project, even when it is in draft. This way people can test the project before it's going live. You can find more information on how to set this up in this support article.