Registration By Approval Only

You can create a community where users can see all or part of the content and change registration that only allows approved members to add or reply to content. This can give your forum a bit of an exclusive feel. You can set this up, by changing registration method to “Approval”.

Some community owners may choose this when they want people to have the information, but not necessarily add their questions or comments, without being pre-screened. This could be used by a professional site that might want a search engine to crawl the information. This allows like-minded professionals to find it, but it won’t let just anyone participate. You must also make sure all social media logins are turned off as well.

Completely Private Forum Or Community

This is a solution for users that want to hide content to non-members.  With a completely private community, all visitors will encounter a login screen before they can see any content. To gain access, users will need to either login with login credentials or register to view the community. Some customers combine a private community with the approval registration option (covered above) to ensure that only approved users can access their community.

To make your community private, you will want to go to plugins and enable “Private Community”

Once enabled you will need to go to settings

The settings are found in the manage roles and permissions. You need to set your community to private:

With the plugin enabled and set to private, only members can see inside your community. This plugin is also helpful as you build your community.  You can use it to allow your beta testers or early adopters to sneak a peek inside your community before you launch.

Now it’s you turn. Do you have a private forum or community? Why did you decide to restrict membership?

Vanilla Forums offers a cloud based solution that allows you to create an open, semi-private or completely private community as your needs require.Try Vanilla Forums Cloud Solution free for 30-days.