What does the wp_blogs public field do?

If I remember correctly:

public – if the blog is publicly visible.

There are three settings for a blog:

Public
Hidden
Private

https://wordpress.com/support/settings/privacy-settings/

So I think it must be an id, not a true/false flag, I don’t know if that’s correct.

No you misunderstood me, I’m talking about the setting in the sites -> info section of the network admin area on multisite. There are a series of checkboxes
Public
Archived
Spam
Deleted
Mature

Unchecking the first one (public) does nothing as far as I can see.

Do you know?

It is poorly named, admittedly.

In this context, “public” = “crawlable by search engines”.

Basically, it will output a robots=noindex on non-public sites.

Here’s more info about it:

https://rudrastyh.com/wordpress-multisite/database-tutorial.html#wp_blogs

Unchecking the first one (public) does nothing as far as I can see.

Those are site attributes, not privacy settings to make the site not visible to non-logged in users.

@otto42

Thank you that makes sense.

@a2hostingrj

Thanks but the article does not actually say what the other options do.

Is this documented anywhere? It is part of core…

I’m looking to restrict access to certain sites to just super admins as I am going to use them as templates to create new sites. Obviously I could code a solution but I’d prefer to use existing functionality if possible.

Pete

In this context, “public” = “crawlable by search engines”.

Basically, it will output a robots=noindex on non-public sites.

Thanks but the article does not actually say what the other options do.

Based on the comment above, it will tell search engines information about your site (mature), I really don’t know about the other settings, and I could not find documentation about it.

I’m looking to restrict access to certain sites to just super admins as I am going to use them as templates to create new sites. Obviously I could code a solution but I’d prefer to use existing functionality if possible.

WordPress has a feature to set sites public/private

No wordpress.com may have that feature but core wordpress does not have that feature unless you install plugins.

Resolving this for good order, I’ve worked it once myself unfortunately. Despite the poor documentation.