Requiring Paid Access to our Community

[Justin McGill]

Does Xenforo connect with Paypal and manage member subscriptions? If so, how is it handled? Does Xenforo have a sign up page for this out of the box?

 

[Chris D]

XenForo has a User Upgrades system, but it isn't integrated with the registration system.

Once a user is registered they can go to their Account > Account Upgrades and purchase the upgrade from there.

The upgrades can either be a one off fee or a recurring charge, and valid permanently or for a limited time.

User Upgrades | XenForo

 

[Justin McGill]

Thanks Chris. What happens if we want them to pay for access though? This will be a membership community with other features (aside from just the forum). I suppose we can have them pay through paypal first and then invite them into the form. However, if they stop paying how do we go about removing them? What are your thoughts on how to best handle it from a paid membership standpoint?

 

[Russ]

You could always make registration open to everyone, have a forum where anyone can ask questions about a membership but then make it so they need to use the built in xenforo user upgrades to be able to access the "full features" of the forums.

Then simply use the permissions to restrict whatever want to "premium member group"

Or to completely restrict registrations to paid I believe there is a plugin out there which I can't recall where it is

 

[Chris D]

When a user purchases a User Upgrade they can be promoted to a user group.

I would therefore suggest allowing any user to register (without a charge), but to access any of the forums and features they would first need to purchase the upgrade.

So a normal registered user may not be able to do anything on the forum besides purchasing the upgrade, but once the upgrade is purchased, that will put them in a user group that will allow them to access forums and other features.

That would happen automatically when the payment is completed. Your forum will receive IPN messages from PayPal, so should the payment be reversed (chargeback) or you refund them, or they stop paying their subscription, PayPal will notify you and then automatically demote the user to a normal member. At which point they'd lose any access to member forums, and other features, until they paid again.

 

[DaveM]

Thanks Chris. What happens if we want them to pay for access though? This will be a membership community with other features (aside from just the forum). I suppose we can have them pay through paypal first and then invite them into the form. However, if they stop paying how do we go about removing them? What are your thoughts on how to best handle it from a paid membership standpoint?

if you really want to manage your subscriptions with a balance type sheet and so on then look at this add on PayPal Balance/Donation System [Paid] | Snog's XenForo Mods & Add-ons I have it running on both my forums and it really just tires everything up for you.

 

[RDR]

@Justin McGill

Have a look at this addon which may be a more complete solution for your use case:

PemBer - Paid Membership & Affiliates System