How to invite a group of "charter members" before I make the forum public?

S

Stiff

Member
My forum is not open to the public yet. I want to invite a team of "charter members" to help me get organized with content and glitches, but I don't want the board opened at large.
Charter members would not be administrators or mods.
How do I do that? So charter members can login, but not the whole universe?
 
You could use .htaccess auth and provide the log in credentials to the charter members and staff only.

Then remove the auth when you launch.
 
Maybe I could just have a private forum (by invitation only) for now? How do I make the forum private (as opposed to closed)?
 
Could also be done with permissions? Create a special user group that can access forums and set unregistered to no?
 
Actually doesn't need special user group. Just set unregistered to no and turn on membership approval in settings
 
To do it that way you would need to set the general view permission to no for the Registered and Unregistered user groups.

Then add the charter and staff members to a new user group with the permission set to yes.

Everyone will still be able to log in but they won't have access to anything.
 
I'm thinking cdub's method will work. The board is closed and has never been open, so I don't have any members yet at all. So, I can make the whole board by invitation only. The stuff that I'm still working on (like finessing rules), I can set to "admin only", so those areas will be out of the eyesight of my Charter members. Sounds right?

Edit: now I realize Brogan may have added something to the mix. Even if I open the board and make it "invitation only", I will have guests (unregistered) looking in on it unless I explicitly exclude them?
 
Yes. That is correct. Although I suggest creating a test regular charter member so you can verify everything is working as it should for them and the permissions are set correctly.
 
I'd put up a big notice for the unregistered group telling them the exciting news that you will be opening soon...Then bulk email them when it's time for the opening ceremony.

Happy Anniversary GIF by Sesame Street
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Mr Lucky said:
I'd put up a big notice for the unregistered group telling them the exciting news that you will be opening soon...Then bulk email them when it's time for the opening ceremony.
Click to expand...
Snipped for focus...
So, how'd you get (and store) emails for unregistered folks? Or am I missing something here?
 
Stiff said:
Snipped for focus...
So, how'd you get (and store) emails for unregistered folks? Or am I missing something here?
Click to expand...
Unregistered are unregistered. You don't have their info.

Incognito mode is unregistered for example. Any user on your site that is not logged in is unregistered.
 
So, I turned the board active for about 30 minutes so I could try out different scenarios. It didn't come out the way I predicted.
1. Even if I changed Unregistered to zero permissions, I could register for membership and log in, but not see anything. If I want to register, I have to register with email. Email shows up with Member name on my Admin list of Users.
2. If I changed Registered (as well as Unregistered) to zero permissions, I could log in, but not see anything.
3. If I had a Charter Member with alternate group as "Registered", they were the same as #2.
4. I had to de-couple Charter Member from "Registered", and assign my dummy accounts to Charter Member, so they could get in and post. I created the users from the Admin panel.

This leaves me with.... I have to decide whether I want people to register even if the board is closed and they can't post?
Alternatively, I could make lemons into lemonade and go with @Mr. Lucky's marketing possibility: send a "open for business" email when the right time comes? I'd maybe want to put a suggestion to register in "the board is closed by under construction" message?

I also found out that no one except me gets access at all if I have a Home url. I removed that one in Basic Options. This made me feel super smart.

Advice needed.
My brain is getting frazzled.

Also, I have to seed the board with posts. Is there any way I can do that from the Admin panel? Otherwise, I have to log in and log out repeatedly using different user names (for the moment masquerading as Charter Members): it's a pain in the butt.
 
Last edited:
You need to turn on membership approval in registration settings. That way only people you approve can register.

Set unregistered to no.

Registered members should have normal permissions.
 
cdub said:
View attachment 260606
Click to expand...
I did in fact have "Enable Manual Approval" selected when I performed my experiment above. Nonetheless, I ended up with new folks on my Admin list of Users.

I suppose I could simply Uncheck "Enable Registration" and no one new could register except whoever (e.g. Charter Members) I registered via the Admin panel....
 
The winning answer seems to be disable new registration. Enable registered members to do whatever I "yes" to, and register the Charter members on the back end.
 
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