Private Community, Approve Members to Join

Hello ​@Kgastaldo you have 2 options here. One would be role based and the other would be group based.

My recommendation would be to create a role. You can build a custom role and assign it to people who get approved. (You can even bring this is permissions wise every 2-4 hours through an API) This role will be required to view the content location. You can build a custom page and set who has permissions to view the page and you could also build an OOTB community board permissions required to view. 
 

The other option would be a private hidden group. You can invite users to this group via a link for them to click or by yourself adding them to the group.

Happy to dive into further detail if youd like!

Thanks Mitchell for the advice. I thought about a group but I don’t want all the content to be there. The whole community just needs to be for them.

I thought about using the role based permissions (making all categories in forums restricted to “registered” would work). It doesn’t stop people from joining who aren’t invited to join though … 

I’ll think through role based. I hadn’t thought about a custom page. Maybe people are sent to the custom page when they join but before they are approved. That would keep them from seeing content/members.

I built this out in my community community.jamf.com If you go to “Get Recognized” then Jamf Heroes we have a page setup for the public to see and learn more about the program. There is an “enter heroes” button on that public page. That, if clicked, requires custom permissions to view.

There is a custom community board that feeds this custom page and we use a 2:1 container to populate it. You can also have it go to an Out Of The Box community page and adjust the top banner with an image if youd like.

Happy to show it and describe in further detail if you are interested!

Hey ​@Kgastaldo 👋, long time no speak!

I see you have SSO set up. Is this the only way users will need to access the private community or are you looking to have default authentication (username + password) available as well?

yeah I think I am facing the same issue. We're using both local login and company SSO as login options.

Is there not a way to prevent users who have created/requested an account from seeing anything until they have been approved?

​@olimarrio - Nice to see you too! It’s actually not for my community but a 2nd one our company runs. No SSO. Some are customers but some have no affiliation with the company. They’re all in Salesforce, but no SSO.

​@mitchell.gordon - So the link from your site goes to a custom landing page. This would definitely work for us. When they click enter heroes - I see I don’t have access. Where does that take them? To a login page?

If people go directly to https://community.jamf.com/, they’ll see members and forum topics. Is the idea that since you don’t have that link listed in the links, people won’t go to it? I’m hoping there’s a way to lock it down so that only members could see that content.

When you click on that Heroes page it takes the users, with permissions I setup, to another custom page. That pages permissions are in the screenshot above. The page is only shown to a handful of permission types. On that page there is a custom community forum. The privileges match the custom pages permissions so only a select few can see what is going on. This creates a private space outside of our public forums for users we choose.

You could apply this to customers, partners or a superuser program like we have used it for. 

I run a customer only community.  if you want me to guide you through what I have set up, and how the registration process works, more than happy to share!
 

The solution shared by ​@mitchell.gordon is interesting, but I think the issue that ​@Kgastaldo means is that when you set up a private community (the login page is the only accessible page for guest users) and let users register with an admin approval, when users have submitted their registration request and are waiting for approval they can still access part of the site: user profiles, main landing page, …

So the question is, is there a way to prevent users who are waiting for their registration approval from seeing anything and be treated like guest users?

It is a bit weird that while they wait for approval they get to access some parts of the site and later on if an admin rejects the registration they suddenly won't be able to see anything… It should work the other way around..

So you can build categories with view-only privileges for users who with not registered or pending approval roles.

That’s how I went a about it, if you are in any role below registered you see only 2 sections, an about and a how to register. You also can only see product updates.  If you are registered, then you get to see customer interactions and questions.

Yeah, the users waiting for approval can also see other user profiles and profile fields which can be awkward if these users end up being banned/not approved…

In our view, the idea of making your community private is to prevent uncontrolled users to access any information on the site.

Any suggestions to solve this?

How are they finding other users.   A user not logged in doesn’t see user comments or posts or replies when configured properly.  
https://community.devo.com/

They only see posts by me in categories that I have designated the role of unregistered or waiting approval can see.
 

Hey ​@juan.delrio 

Well for instance, on your landing page you have a leaderboard preview where you see the top users, and on the full leaderboard (https://community.devo.com/leaderboard?period=alltime) you can just see any users and click on them to visit their profile.

Easy to remove and add to a custom page  :)
And we encourage users to be as anonymous as they feel they need to be.  But none of their conversations are exposed which is the meat. 

Yep agreed.

I think it works in your case, indeed. When users are aware of this and when their profile are quite empty of information the "risk” is minimal.

​@jvdc 👋,

Agree that the set up for private communities doesn’t make sense here. I’m discussing with our Product team how we can solve for this, either through the upcoming Personalisation functionality or by editing the configuration altogether. Thanks!

Yep, All profile fields except 2 are private for admins only.  Name and A bit about yourself are the only two fields viewable by members.