User management
XenForo provides extensive tools and utilities to drive engagement, reward participation and handle misbehaviour.
Just-in-time registration
Guest visitors to your forum can compose messages and comments like registered users, and XenForo will present them with an account creation form after they submit their text, giving them a big incentive to become members in order to get their content posted.
Easy registration
Having a user register on your site is always the first barrier, so XenForo makes the process as simple as possible.
For an even speedier registration and login workflow, users can authenticate against their existing accounts with Google, Facebook, Twitter and more.
Fine-grained permissions
At the core of the XenForo user management system is the concept of permissions: user rights to perform actions and view content.
Users may belong to multiple user-groups, with permissions attached to each group or to individual specific users.
A user's final materialized permissions are calculated from their combined user group permissions and any permissions set specifically for that user.
Customize the data you collect
In addition to email address and other essential data, XenForo makes it easy for administrators to create custom user data fields to store information such as a Twitter handle, favorite color, location etc.
Custom field values can be freeform, of a specified format or selected from a predefined list, with styling set up by the community administrators.
Reward achievements
The trophy system in XenForo allows site owners to award their users with 'trophies' for reaching specific milestones, such as posting their first new thread, receiving their first positive reaction or on the anniversary of their membership.
Trophies can be defined for a huge variety of criteria or combination of criteria, and each trophy adds a number of 'trophy points' to the receiving user's profile, which can then be used to trigger further actions or rewards, such as an upgrade to the user's 'title'.
Custom user lists
Rather than a simple list of all the registered members of your site, instead XenForo offers the ability to define custom 'member statistics'.
These allow you to list those members with the most messages, the most positive reactions, members with birthdays today or any number of other metrics you may wish to employ.
Precision messaging
From the XenForo control panel, your community administrators can use the criteria builder to construct a list of members, then either send a message to them directly, or export contact details for use in your bulk mailer of choice.
Discipline
The Internet has more than its fair share of trolls, spammers and antisocial miscreants. Even normally well-behaved users may need a course correction from time to time.
XenForo provides an extensive range of tools to help you minimize their impact on the smooth running of your forum.
Reports
Content posted to a XenForo installation can be reported to staff by other users and will appear in the staff console for their attention.
Warnings
Staff may issue a formal warning to a user, along with an explanatory message.
Warnings can act cumulatively, so the most recent warning may trigger an automated sanction against the offending user such as a temporary suspension of privileges or even an outright ban - all without the staff having to keep a manual log of trouble-makers.
Banning
When users misbehave persistently, staff may prevent them from interacting with the community by banning their account, either permanently or for a specified period.
The nuclear option
For those visitors who won't take the hint, 'The Discourager' is a system designed to frustrate troublesome users to the point that they go away of their own accord.
You can define a random chance of receiving a blank page, or of a page taking an excessively long time to load, or of receiving a server error etc., such that the targeted user may presume that your site is having server or connection issues and leave you alone, instead of fighting through the interminable errors to spread their mischief.