Behavior change in password-protected store pages?

I could have sworn that when you put a password on a store (fka product) page, the products on that page would not appear in summary blocks or product blocks in other pages. But today I see that products do appear when referenced in other pages even if they live on password-protected store pages.

Am I going crazy or did that behavior change in the last year?

(Forgive me if this question is redundant, but I was not able to find mention of this in a forum search.)

We're on Montauk/7.0.

On 7/18/2021 at 11:21 PM, LKW said:

I could have sworn that when you put a password on a store (fka product) page, the products on that page would not appear in summary blocks or product blocks in other pages. But today I see that products do appear when referenced in other pages.

This was not the expected behaviour. I'm sure that other blocks were not able to access password-protected collections, so this appears to be a bug on both 7.0 and 7.1. You can report this to Squarespace by contacting Customer Care.

On 7/19/2021 at 4:25 AM, paul2009 said:

This is not the expected behaviour. Other blocks should not be able to access password-protected collections, so this appears to be a bug on both 7.0 and 7.1. You can report this to Squarespace by contacting Customer Care.

I reported this Customer Care and they say it's expected behavior: "Product Blocks pull content from Store Pages to display on other pages. As long as the page where the Product Block is located is not password protected, customers will be able to purchase those items through the Product Block... To hide products in a Product Block from the public, we recommend password protecting the page where the Product Block has been added..."

Their reply made no mention of any recent change in this behavior. Although, as I say, I could have sworn it worked differently a year ago.

The funny thing is that the new behavior solves a problem we've had for a long time, which is that the Product/Store Page is completely inflexible, and other than changing its title, you can't add explanatory text or any additional content to it. So we display our products in Product Blocks and Summary Blocks on other pages with more context for our visitors. But we were unable to prevent our visitors from viewing the raw Product Page because, if we password-protected it, its products would disappear from Summary Blocks and Product Blocks. Now it looks like we can put a password on a Product Page without affecting product visibility elsewhere, and I'm happy with that.

I just wish I could get assurance that yes this is new behavior and it's going to stay this way.

6 hours ago, LKW said:

Their reply made no mention of any recent change in this behavior. Although, as I say, I could have sworn it worked differently a year ago.

I agree with you. However, I have confirmed this is now the intended behaviour - for collection items to display information in these blocks even if the source page is password-protected. To quote a Product Specialist, "It's very possible that a system bug was disallowing this, and that we fixed it."