Quote:
Originally Posted by idlewild
You know what’s hilarious?
ANY RFID tag will work on our gates.
Don’t believe me? Try any other fob or if you don’t have one, have a visitor swipe his/her company employee access card, a key fob to any parking garage, etc. on any of our residence only readers and the gate will spring right open!
We discovered this when visiting as guests ourselves, reaching for the red button with our keys in hand (and garage fob to our condo back in Cleveland attached to the keychain), and hearing the reader beep before actually pressing the button.
So our readers don’t actually check your villages-issued ID at all - they simply open for any passive RFID tag. It’s hilarious - especially given the 11 pages of this thread - and swiping is therefore totally unnecessary.
And since the gates only purpose is understandably safety, not security (ie to bring traffic to a stop at the village entrances), I’m firmly in the camp of removing both the readers and separate resident only entrances and just keeping the gates in construction / car sensing mode.
This would, of course, eliminate the need to designate a visitor lane and any false sense of security the family may want you to have living in a “gated community.” But let’s at least be honest here.
To me, what’s most frustrating is surely the family’s upper echelon not only knows about this community “feature” but also choose to continue to promote the false sense of security by building such resident-only entrances. Instead, they ignored the whole pesky access control list / database maintenance overhead a resident might understandably assume is included in our “not-an-HOA” monthly amenity fees.
Anyway, just sharing this as I hate seeing people taken advantage of - even if those same people lock the doors to their convertible while leaving the top down.
And I’m shocked more people don’t know about this already as we’ve been using other fobs for years. Maybe now that it’s out and Peter Bernard Bubble Wraps it (IYKYK) - it might spur the family to minimally acknowledge it and hopefully make a change: actually enforce gate security or remove the nonsensical scanners altogether.
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I really don't see the point of your post. Most people know that anyone can open the gate by just pressing the red button. So, there should no "false" sense of security. The gates are mostly for traffic control, not security. I think the purpose for the visitor lane is to allow visitors to ask for directions or other information without delaying the residents. I am still waiting for these long range gate cards that The Villages has been promising for years, but they never seem to be able to produce. Without them, many people still need to open their window to open the gate unless they have a cloned mirror card.