Is anyone running a private community for customers?

That’s us and we’re doing great. 

The switch from private to hybrid (public setting, private forums) was very good for adoption and usage IMO. It happened 3 years ago, so I don’t have good data to prove that. But removing the friction for them to even use the community navigation and search is a big improvement. 

It’s good that you caught the public profile thing. That part is very limiting and we’ve had to make all profile fields private (admins and users themselves only see them), which limits users from being able to see any info/context about the other users outside of rank, badges, username, and join date. But it hasn’t been a blocker of engagement, because outside of a few fields Profiles are major weak spot of Gainsight CC and not much of a value add IMO. I’d love to see improvement here, but I don’t think it’s a priority for them (never ever mentioned on roadmaps, no movement on related ideas). 

I will note that the activity feeds on profiles do respect forum/category permissions. So you don’t need to worry about public access to those. (They won’t be able to see posts and replies even though profiles have tabs and feeds that show them when logged in)

The anonymity issue was less of a problem for us. We solved it by emailing everyone and allowing them to request an update to their username. And for everyone who hadn’t been active ever (we migrated over) or in since the date we sent the email, we updated all their usernames to First name Last initial via bulk API calls. 

Other Public modules if you’re able to move to the “hybrid” setup: 

• Events
• Product Updates

Hi ​@Kgastaldo. Our community is private and SSO is enabled. We made all fields in the profile optional to allow members to decide how much or little they want to share/disclose. 

Thank you both! I think we’re going to start with everything gated (private community), as they don’t want any profile info available without logging in. I’ll have a mix from there of content restricted by role (customer, partner, employee). I’d rather prioritize their comfort level; rather go private and have people join than not join at all!