Giving admin, ftp access to developers

Hey, back when I was starting my site in 2008. I did not mind giving developers access to admin to fix what ever issues in a paid mod.

however now that i have an established site with 5k members and growing its kinda hard to give anyone access with fear of stealing members and or ideas from it.

99% of the time that may not be the intention but that 1% scares me.

what about u guys? Ladies?

Quite often there is no choice. In many cases developers have to see the problem as it occurs on the site having the problems. Especially if it can't be reproduced on the developers site. It's part of the debugging process and can't be avoided.

If a developer steals anything from you. Then it should be reported. As that person should at the very least no longer be allowed to sell products or services here. Personally i cannot see how any developer would be interested in your members.

I am much more concern with an oops happening; even a seasoned IT person can have an oops, than the person wanting to see who my members are or what I have created with Dolphin.  If I am having an issue with a module I purchased, I usually will clone the current site and let the module developer work on that site; plus it keeps the production site online in case the site would need to be shut during the work.

You should only be worried if that developer releases a fake member database the next day. 

By the way, cloning your site if you have shell access is very quick if you have given some thought when you set up your server.  The production site sits in /mysite.  The database that holds the site is named mysite.  Set up a subdomain or a regular domain to use for your clone.  In the case of subdomain, you can use test.mysite.tld which will point to the directory holding the test site when you set up Apache or Nginx or other webserver.  Our clone directory will be mysite_test.

Backup the database of the production site.  Create a new database named mysite_test and import the backup of the production site database export/backup you created.  now cd to the directory holding /mysite.  For example, if mysite is in /var/public_html/mysite then cd to /var/public_html.  Issue the command cp -rp mysite mysite_test.  Site is cloned.  Now go to /mysite_test/inc/header.inc.php and edit the file to use your subdomain and root location of mysite_test and database mysite_test.

You now have a clone site that is identical to your production site for allowing someone to figure out what is wrong.  Once they determine what is wrong, they can tell you what they had to do so you can apply it to your production site.  When I work on my site, I never work directly on the production site; if I do an oops, then no harm done and I can reclone the site and start over.

As for FTP access, you can chroot them to the /var/putblic_html/mysite_test.

An even bigger issue is not so much of stealing members or ideas, but unintentionally messing up your code, be cautious of who you give access to. There are really only a handful of persons here that I would even consider giving my credentials to - such as Deano, GG, Modzz (if I ever had one of his mods), and only a few others.

So, the only thing I could recommend before giving out credentials - in additions to what GG already stated - search the forums and see what kind of assistance that person has given to others already, and the responses those who have been helped give. This will hopefully help in determining if the person is knowledgeable enough to fix your issue. I wouldn't just give it out to anyone that says "PM me your admin credentials".

thanks everyone, there are great honest developers here and some have helped me out in the past 5'ish years answering questions here on the board. others like GG shared there knowledge with me.

 I have my degree in aeronautical science, and airport is my thing this website thing i'm able to do thanks to the support of u guys. i really appreciate it.