Private forum areas - Question

I don't think that's possible, Darran, as the whole community is public - Although, I guess you could set them all to banned users, and then only allow them access to that one area (With an additional role). 🤔

What I'd suggest you do, is to make sure that the category and board is at the very top of your community, so it's the first thing your colleagues see.

Either way, educate every single employee on the new initiative.
Many communities with active employees (other than direct staff) have a special set of guidelines for them to adhere to. (Don't start new topic in public, don't speculate, don't share your personal views etc).

Cheers,
Ditte

Hi Ditte

Thanks for the reply, good to know. Good shout setting it to the top as publicly it wouldn't be seen anyway but the team we are working with would see it as the first area.

We are pulling together guidelines to be super clear on what we expect them to do and not do on the forum, i.e only post in your own area, never publicly etc etc.

We are doing the same with our superuser group (following your session at the lab), to set expectations 🙂

Thanks

Darran

I think it is possible:

1. Create a custom role
2. Give the specific users the custom role
3. Make sure your forums have the proper rights (custom role cannot see anything except the private area forum, everyone else cannot see the private area forum.

We did this in reverse, and it works like a charm.

That's great to know, Koen! Thanks for sharing 🙂

Thanks @Koen Sterken

I will give that a go and see if it works!!

Thanks

Darran

@Koen Sterken I have had a look, not sure I see where to stop them seeing all the other forums?

Hi @OVOdarran,

You should configure the visibility in the forum overview:

In this screen you see all your (custom) roles, and what they can see for this specific forum. As you can see you can give the roles rights to see the forum, comment on topics in this forum, and create new topics in this forum.

And yes, we have a lot of custom roles, most only for reporting purposes.

Ah ok I will have a go and see if I can get it to work :)

Thanks!

Hey Darran,

I just had a sneak-peek into your settings, to me it looks alright! 🙂 You should be good to go.

Next time you can of course also use your staging environment for this - that's what it's for and you will not have to be scared that someone might notice it when you are making mistakes while fiddling around with the settings. ;)

Good luck with your project!

Cheers,

Julian

@Julian Thanks for having a look. My question is if the users (when we set them up) are set to registered users, won't that mean they will be able to see all the other areas?

Not clear on how I set the custom role to only view certain forum areas and exclude all others or am I missing something?

Darran

Meh, you are right @OVOdarran. As a new user you do not have the proper role yet. Therefor you can see everything except the forum you were looking for.

@Koen Sterken Yeah I think we might need a new "Role" to assign to these users, a bit like the superuser one.....so we don't have to set them as registered users? @Julian can you confirm??

I have tested with one of the team that will be using this new area and have created a custom role "IHT Team" which I have set their user profile to, but they are still a registered user overall so still see everything.

Hey guys!

sorry, technically I'm on holiday, so I am more busy with laying in the sun these days. 😃 Nevertheless I could not resist to click on the notifications I received about this. :p

You're right, that's a rather important detail that I must have overlooked. Your colleagues are registered users as a primary role, the right to see it overrules the right not to see it.

A way out for you will be to select them as Super users as a primary role. I have just checked and so far you have not given this role to any user.

Of course this is not directly what this primary role has been added for, it would be nicer to have a generic primary role for this.

Regardless, the primary role "Super user" (at the moment at least) is merely a label, and further does not have any other impact (as in special rights) for these users, besides that they are being displayed as a seperate user group in your analytics.

So if I were you, I would simply give them that primary role and remove the rights to see the customer-facing subforums there, as well as adding the right to see the IHT-related subforums.

Then it should simply work. You can stop using the custom IHT role then as well, as the Super user role will do everything you need.

Should you desire to give your super users special rights in the future, then I would handle it by using custom roles.

Let me know if there are any further questions!

Cheers,

Julian

Oh one small note I want to add: If your colleagues look at the community while not being logged in, they will still see all customer-facing subforums. This could only be prevented by disabling the visibility to all logged-out users, I would not recommend this in your case.

Anyhow, as they are logged out / will not see it once they are logged in, there is no risk that they do something wrong. 😉