Security Required for Attachments

Thanks for submitting this idea @TimBer - do you have any more specifics about this use case, to help us understand why you’d want to restrict the downloads? E.g. what’s the content of the files, and which kinds of members should the files be restricted to?

Hi @daniel.boon 

Our community is a private community for users of ERP software. Our members like to share code and examples of their work, to either seek help, showcase achievements or help solve another members problem. 

Our forum is currently private and restricted so that only paid members can access and download attachments from the community.

We’d like to be able to extend the reach of the community by making the forums publicly available, and searchable. However, in order to do this this we need to ensure the security of the proprietary information that our members are sharing with peers. 

In addition, allowing the downloading of content from the community without the need to login prevents us from converting these potential members and/or monitoring who has downloaded specific files.

Currently an opportunity exists for us to make forums public and create a registration funnel in order for non-members to comment on posts/create topics. Security on downloads would further increase our conversion opportunities and push these users into our membership channel.

Has there been any movement on this topic? We are in a similar situation. While 90% of our community is public, we have some forum sections that restricted to paying customers or partners. We sometimes post files in those sections that are ok to share with Partners but not with customers or the general pubic and would love that the download link could be protected behind a permission group. IE, if you do not have the role of Partner, you can’t download this file, even if someone gave you the direct link. 

We used GA and I noticed that someone must be giving links from downloads in a hidden forum section to other people.