Only access to subforum

Is the rest of your community public? Then the answer is no.

If your community is set to private, then it should be possible.

My assumptions:

• Your community is private
• Registered users have access to the community content
• The select group of people doesn't have an account yet

I'd propose the following:

• You create a "Custom User Role" with a name like "Select Group"
• You create an account for every member of the select group of people
• You set the "Primary Role" of their accounts to "Waiting for moderator approval", instead of "Registered Users -> so they don't have access to the community content
• You set the "Custom User Role" of their accounts to "Select Group"
• You then create a subforum (category) and set the permissions of the "Select Group", so for them this subforum (category) is visible and they can create comments and topics -> This way they should only have access to this one subforum (category)
• If you want to exclude registered users from this subforum (category), then you have to set the permissions accordingly

Hi Monique,

thanks for sharing your question here!

I had a similar conversation with @Rodion over the past days, as he is trying to achieve something like this as well.

Until now this is not possible. A reason could be that we assumed that categories which are visible to all registered users are not harmful or should be invisible to a select group.

Usually this also is no problem with the right communication (e.g. emphasize which categories are for what, and that the group should not interact outside of the hidden categories), however there might be some situations where this is not enough...

I have shared this feedback with the product team already, as I personally think this is something worth improving.

My first question to you however would be: How do you feel about users (from this select group) seeing the public categories while not being logged in, compared to seeing a completely different list of categories after logging in? I would find it a bit strange as a user, but that might depend on the context.

My second question would be: What exactly would you like to prevent by "hiding" these categories?

Regards,

Julian

Hi @Julian,
Let me also ask top your question 1 (despite the requestor cancelled the task because of terms).

1. Yes it is a bit strange actually, as for mу - to see another content before and after login. But as you said about emphasizing, in my case those restricted group of people had to work in that private space, and they would be measures according to their work there. So it is realy easy to explain some professionals that they will see different content after login because of . But it is harder to explain them they should not waste their business time watching the community.

Thanks for the feedback, Rodion!

I understand what you mean, with clear communication you can manage the expectation for these users...

I will take your feedback with me, of course it would also be interesting to hear from others how they feel about this.

Hi @bjoern_schulze,

Unfortunately, our community is not private, so your suggestions wouldn't work here. Many thanks for your feedback though!

My first question to you however would be: How do you feel about users (from this select group) seeing the public categories while not being logged in, compared to seeing a completely different list of categories after logging in? I would find it a bit strange as a user, but that might depend on the context.

My second question would be: What exactly would you like to prevent by "hiding" these categories?
Hi @Julian,

I can imagine why you're wondering about this. As the Consumentenbond is an association, we have a council that helps and advices our director amongst other people, about our strategy, annual reports, budget, which direction we should go, etc. You can probably imagine that this council speaks about a lot of subjects which are privacy-sensitive or ''secret''.

This council is looking for a platform to communicate on in between meetings. We are looking into several options here, and one of them is indeed to create a hidden category into our community for our council. So far, so good.

The only problem here is that most of the councilmembers are quite old, and not that digitally minded. This means that there would be a real chance of one of them accidentally posting something in a wrong public category. Looking at the subjects they discuss, we want to prevent this at all costs.

Hopefully this explains why we would want to ban this group from the rest of our community, except for their own hidden category. 🙂

I wrote a big reply to @Julian as well to explain, but got the message my reply has to be authorized first. Still not seeing it. 😥

Hi Monique,

thanks a lot for the hint, I was a bit slow with checking the spam filter - still getting used to being a public community. 😃 Just fyi I passed my feedback to my colleagues that it would be handy to have more visibility for posts "stuck" in the spam filter...

Also thanks for providing some context as to what you think is a risk here. I can relate to that, I also had it on my previous community that employees would confuse the public community with a private one - it can happen at all ages. ;)

Thanks to your post (and feedback from Rodion and others) our product team is more aware of this limitation. Nothing concrete yet but this is a clear use case and we understand that an improvement would be very valuable for you and others. I will discuss it in our next feedback meeting, if I get something concrete out of it, I will make sure to share it here with you!

Cheers,

Julian