@ ncjwghs
re: Our password protected membership directory is suddenly open to the public without requiring a password.
Which method did you use to password protect the page? Add a password to the page or made it private?
Did you enable either of the shortcode overrides on the Connections : Settings admin page under the General tab? If you did, are you using either or both of the shortcode overrides? If any of this is, yes, disable both shortcode overrides and then remove those shortcode overrides from the [connections]
shortcode. That should fix it up.
re: Also it takes several minutes to load. How do we fix this?
How many entries are you showing on a page? Ifit more than 20, 50 absolute max, you need to reduce the limit set page_limit shortcode option. If you have disabled pagination or have a high number and you must have that, then you will need to look into adding a caching plugin to you site, it help quite a bit. Why? pretty much for the same reason WP limits the blog posts to only a few posts per page … the more you show, the longer the page load will be.
Hope that helps!