One of the challenges of running an online community is who you invite or let in to participate.
While some communities are "open", some other communities, as a result of their nature, tend to be a bit more vigilant about who can come in and read/post.
Zoho Discussions has for long supported membership and provides fine-grained control over who can access and participate in a conversation, but today we are building on that and making it a bit easier.
We built a nifty feature that simplifies life for community admins:
membership requests
.
Membership requests allow visitors to apply for memberships that the community admin would then evaluate and grant. If adopted for your community, this subscription feature in Zoho Discussions will help you know your users better and also help reduce spam. This is also ideal for open communities where you would like to know your users better before you allow them in to participate. This feature also integrates well with the existing moderation options, by
enabling you to provide subscribers a higher level of access to specific areas of your community. For example: you could allow everyone to come and read the posts, but then only allow posting to people who have been screened. Or you could allow read/post grants in certain forums, but access to other forums to only the users you choose.
So how do you go about setting one up? All you need to do is toggle a switch in your Portal settings. (you can read this in detail
here
Once you do that, users visiting your community will see a prompt in the portal specific login page (which you can
customize
too). If your portal is open for guest access, a guest will see a prominent widget prompting for subscription.
How Can My Memebrs Login On My Site
While it may come off as being overly exclusive, controlling who gets to join and not gives less work to the moderator, since it lessens the chances of problematic people coming into the forum.
While it may come off as being overly exclusive, controlling who gets to join and not gives less work to the moderator, since it lessens the chances of problematic people coming into the forum.