Private Community

[whassell20]

1. Is it possible to make the community completely private? No access to anyone until you are logged into the site?

2. Is it possible for a membership site, for users to sign up for membership but have to wait until it is approved by admin before a user can log in? I want to have a paid membership private site but I want to approve each user before the member gets access to the site/membership.

 

[whynot]

1. Is it possible to make the community completely private? No access to anyone until you are logged into the site?

2. Is it possible for a membership site, for users to sign up for membership but have to wait until it is approved by admin before a user can log in? I want to have a paid membership private site but I want to approve each user before the member gets access to the site/membership.

#1 Cannot see any content without logging in: Yes
#2 Yes.

 

[whassell20]

#1 Cannot see any content without logging in: Yes
#2 Yes.

What are the best options for this? Membership and verification?

 

[Sperber]

Basicly the usergroup settings. Depends on what you have in mind exactly.

 

[whassell20]

Basicly the usergroup settings. Depends on what you have in mind exactly.

A completely private network

 

[Sperber]

That´s not what I meant with exactly. As said, the visbillity can be adjusted per usergroup. But shall it be

• open regsitration
• invite only (add-ons available)
• Paid membership (add-ons available)
• ... ?

Just have a look into the resource manager area where you can find for nearly every purpose an add-on.

 

[whassell20]

Paid membership only @Sperber

 

[Sperber]

Unmaintained - [AddonFlare] Paid Registrations

Note: The Lite/Free version is available on our website, choose the "Lite" option on the product page. How many paid subscriptions are you losing each month because your users don't know the benefits of purchasing a user upgrade? Do they even...

xenforo.com

 

[whassell20]

Thanks. I will look into this. Does this have a verification process as well, where users can be verified?

 

[AddonFlare]

Thanks. I will look into this. Does this have a verification process as well, where users can be verified?

You can use the Paid Registrations add-on to move the user to an “unverified” user group after payment. Then to verify them you would list the user’s in that group in the adminCP and move them to a “verified” user group that would have permissions to view the forum. We can always do a bit of custom development to make this an easier process and show a notification block in the adminCP home with the number of users that are pending. PM us if that’s something you’re interested in.

 

[Sim]

I run several private forums - one I use for staff discussions and project tracking / documentation, one I run for a business association - small businesses all in the same industry working together to improve education / marketing outcomes for their industry, and another is a private site for a group of families who all have kids adopted from the same country and who have regular meetups and go on holidays together - it's largely a private photo sharing site.

It's all done via usergroup permissions and a few customisations to make the UI entry point cleaner rather than simply showing an error message to people who are not logged in or approved.

I'm about to start work on a new private site which will be for paid members only - it's likely to be a high cost / low volume site, so I'll probably just manually add paid members to a specific user group which will open up access to the private discussions.

 

[whassell20]

I run several private forums - one I use for staff discussions and project tracking / documentation, one I run for a business association - small businesses all in the same industry working together to improve education / marketing outcomes for their industry, and another is a private site for a group of families who all have kids adopted from the same country and who have regular meetups and go on holidays together - it's largely a private photo sharing site.

It's all done via usergroup permissions and a few customisations to make the UI entry point cleaner rather than simply showing an error message to people who are not logged in or approved.

I'm about to start work on a new private site which will be for paid members only - it's likely to be a high cost / low volume site, so I'll probably just manually add paid members to a specific user group which will open up access to the private discussions.

Your last paragraph is my plan exactly. Could you assist with the setup you are describing?

 

[whassell20]

You can use the Paid Registrations add-on to move the user to an “unverified” user group after payment. Then to verify them you would list the user’s in that group in the adminCP and move them to a “verified” user group that would have permissions to view the forum. We can always do a bit of custom development to make this an easier process and show a notification block in the adminCP home with the number of users that are pending. PM us if that’s something you’re interested in.

Thanks for the response. I am pretty sure I still have this addon. I willl look into this. Does a verification check come with this addon?

 

[Sim]

Could you assist with the setup you are describing?

It's fairly straight forward - although the exact configuration will depend on whether you want non-paying members to be able to access any of the forum content (eg pre-sales discussions etc), or whether everything is private.

It will also depend on how you want users to pay for upgrades - if you want to use the built in forum upgrade mechanism, you're going to need to have fully "approved" members because user awaiting approval can't use upgrades. If paying externally - that won't matter.

The way I was going to set it up was to have the "Unregistered / Unconfirmed" usergroup permissions set to "No" for everything (use the Quick set function) except the "Use contact form" option:



... then it's a pretty simple matter of approving members to give them access - but that's because we were going to have an external payment system in place.

If you want to have XenForo payments, then you'd need to do things a bit differently and it becomes slightly more complicated - and again, it would depend on whether non-paying members get access to any topics. Generally, I'd use Node permissions instead - have your main category nodes all set to "Private node" and then have a "[Paid upgrade]" usergroup which is automatically assigned once payment is received - and give that user group view access to the private nodes.

Either way - it's all standard XenForo functionality, just a matter of learning which options to use.

I also suggest you install XenForo into a subdirectory so that you can front-end the members-only forum with a public-facing CMS (WordPress or similar) - either that, or install XenForo on a subdomain - which would probably be easier if you have an existing website you'll be using to attract users to your forum.