Admin Accounts

As an administrator of a Spanglefish 3 website you have an account with Spanglefish 3. We hold very little details about you in this - the date created, your name, email address, a hash of your password and a record of whether you're happy to receive occasional emails from us.

This one account may give you admin access to more than one Spanglefish website, so to log into any Spanglefish 3 website you have access to you'll use the same email address and password. Note that this is unlike Spanglefish 2 where you had a different password for each site you managed.

If you have access to more than one Spanglefish 3 website, on the Dashboard of one you can click Your Details > Your Websites to easily switch between the admin dashboards of all.

In theory, this is a nice simple system which allows you to manage all your sites efficiently, but there is some confusion and complexity about it.

Confusion

Some users of Spanglefish 3 have set up their first site using an email address specific to that site for their account. So for example Beryl, the clerk of Hogwash Community Council has a website using the domain www.hogwashcc.org and her Spanglefish 3 account uses the email clerk@hogwashcc.org.

Beryl then also gets asked to be clerk of the neighbouring council, Twaddle, and asks us to set up a website on www.twaddlecc.org. We do so and make Beryl the administrator.

Beryl is understandably confused that she has to log into the Twaddle Community Council website using her clerk@hogwashcc.org email address.

For this reason we recommend that Beryl should really use a personal email address for her Spanglefish 3 account - maybe she has beryl.clerk@gmail.com or something like that.

Note that the email used to log in is NOT used anywhere else in the system - it's not where Enquiry Form messages or invoices go etc.

Should Beryl give up being clerk at Hogwash in the future, she'd just create someone else as administrator and delete herself as admin on Hogwash CC. She'll still have access to the Twaddle site.

Complications

As mentioned at the top of this page, this really should be a nice, simple and efficient system. But there's one complication which makes it messy.

When you are logging into one of your websites you are doing so on that website's address. So Beryl can log in on www.twaddlecc.org or www.hogwashcc.org.

Unfortunately your browser or device treats these two websites as completely separate - when you log into one your device won't automatically remember the password for the other.

There are two solutions to this.

Use a password you can remember. That way you'll be able to type it in when logging into both/all of your sites. Your browser will remember the password for each one the first time you log into it. This is fine, but it's a shame because your device would probably offer to create a long, complicated random password for you when you first set your account up and it's difficult to copy this over.
Use a complex, device generated password, but manually copy it over when first logging into your second website. Most browsers will allow you to view your saved passwords. Do this, copy the password for your first site then paste it in when logging into your second site. Your browser should then remember it.

Alternatively you can always log into Site 1 and then use Your Details > Your Websites to switch to Site 2.

Changing your Password

You can change your password at any time by going to Dashboard > Your Details > Edit Your Info.

However, remember that if you have more than one site this will change the password for all your sites.