If you are adding a Five College user to your site, be sure to grant access to their Mount Holyoke guest account (email address ending in @mtholyoke.edu). Students get a guest account automatically upon registering for courses. Faculty can get one by filling out the affiliate form, here: https://offices.mtholyoke.edu/sites/default/files/hr/docs/affiliate.docx
If you are an instructor using WordPress for a student project, talk to the Educational Technology team about whether it would be helpful to have a WordPress administrator add students to the site, which they can do while skipping the confirmation email step.
Privacy settings in WordPress can be found in the Dashboard, under Settings > Reading.
Wordpress allows you to choose between five privacy settings, as seen in the image above.
The first two options make your site available to the general public.
The remaining three settings limit visibility to members of the MHC and Five Colleges community by requiring viewers to log in to commons before viewing.