Is it possible for users to charge a fee to permit other users access to their groups, and related group materials? I know it is not an off-the-shelf feature, but is it possible?

Paid group membership (in turn granting access to specific categories) is an existing feature. Take a look in #plugins Examples include Patreon, Procourse Memberships and Subscriptia. If you have an existing website which handles such memberships you can also deliver group membership information via your SSO payload. Users can’t charge others fees directly on a site they don’t own, would it make sense for them to even be able to?

Thanks for the reply, @Stephen. I am aware of the examples that you’ve included, as well as the sso option. Would it make sense? Anything can make sense. Imagine a lively forum with great content creators coming together for discourse and solving problems; however, they could also create private groups that only paying members could access. This way, the forum participants could monetize their activity on the forum, and the forum owner could monetize with a split/commission. Win-win-win. I’m only curious if this is possible. @angus, generally speaking (not looking for a quote here), does something like this seem possible?

Please don’t tag people. There are lots of implications here to be considered, and examples of how users can be connected to service providers without writing any code. Take the #marketplace for example, users are connected to consultants without the need for special code or payment processing. Managing these kinds of transactions is a very tricky and risky process. Within the EU and US you also have to consider the many money laundering laws.

[תמונה] Joshua_Kogan: Imagine a lively forum with great content creators coming together for discourse and solving problems; however, they could also create private groups that only paying members could access. This way, the forum participants could monetize their activity on the forum, and the forum owner could monetize with a split/commission. Win-win-win. A lot of people come up with this idea, but in the end any creator can have their own Discourse for $5 a month and skip the middleman fee. Which is a great thing, one of the core missions of Discourse is to promote decentralization on the web.

Thanks for the reply, @Falco. Indeed creators can start-up their own discourse; however, having one discourse with many creators discussing with one another, then offering specialized materials for fee, would create a platform that lets people find the creator in the first place. That would be the value. I’m gathering that this type of functionality is not possible. Thanks for the feedback!

The functionality is completely possible. Obviously, you will need to fund the development of it. I think with $10K you can get a modified ProCourse Memberships 💸 to have multiple “memberships” members can buy would do it. Each membership gives access to a group, each group access to a category.

@Joshua_Kogan You could do this right now in two different ways using the Custom Wizard plugin. Take payment externally One method would be to send the user to a payment provider upon submission of one step of a custom wizard, ensure the payment is completed using a combination of permitted params and required data, then add the user to a group on a subsequent step (using the “Add to Group” action). This is a full description of the payment piece of this approach. The add to group piece should be self explanatory: Send user to payment provider setup Route To Action . There’s a new action type called “Route To” that allows you to send a user to a destination url upon submission of a step. For your wizards, the action should be added to whatever step precedes the user’s payment. Currently they’re added to the ‘payment’ step itself, but you can remove this step and add them to the preceding step if you like.The route to action currently has two settings: url: This is the destination url. As with other wizard inputs, you can interpolate data using w{} for wizard fields and u{} for user fields. code: A unique code to add as a parameter to the destination url. When this setting is filled the custom wizard will generate a unique random hex string that it: adds to the url as an addtional query param using the key you provide; and saves the code in the submission data using the key you provide Associating a unique key with each request allows any callback for that request (i.e. when the user returns to the wizard) to be validated. In the chargify case, chargify will store any value you send in the parameter ‘reference’ (see further), which you can then add to the ‘return url’ what chargify redirects the user to after they’ve completed payment. Permitted Params . This a new step setting that allows you to specify what query params are permitted for the step and the key they should be saved with in the submission data. You can use this to both save statistical or analytical data (such as where the user has entered the wizard from), and for callbacks. In the chargify case we passed the ‘reference’ code to chargify (and saved it in the submission data) when we redirected the user to chargify to complete payment. We would then add this code to the ‘return url’ as a return parameter which we then save to the submissions by adding whatever paramter we specify as holding the customer_reference in the return paramters.Note that in chargify you’ll need to set the ‘return url’ to url of the step after the step you attached the ‘route to’ action to. This means that you’ll be adding the customer_reference param as a permitted paramter to that same step. Required Data . This is a new step setting that allows you to impose a data check before allowing a user to view the step. Currently you can require a piece of submission data to equal another piece of submission data.If the user tries to load the step and the required data check fails, they’ll see an error message. In the chargify case we’ll use this to require the code we created in the “Route To” action to equal the customer_reference returned by chargify.You can customise the error message show to users using the “Message show when data not present” field in the wizard admin. Additionally, there is a “Restart Wizard” link appended to the error message allowing the user to reset the wizard to step 1 and clear existing inputs. Take payment internally You can use ProCourse Memberships to take payment. You can also use almost any payment provider if they have an API that supports OAuth2, or Basic authorization (Stripe uses Basic authorization for exmple), by setting up an API connection using the Custom Wizard’s “Send to API” action and associated API endpoint management system. How you set this up will depend on the provider. This approach is less stable; it’s a feature in beta, but it has significant potential.

[תמונה] Joshua Kogan: Is it possible for users to charge a fee to permit other users access to their groups, and related group materials? This doesn’t directly solve the problem, but it’s close: Discourse Subscriptions Plugin Ignoring possible legal issues, there are existing online subscription services that could likely be used to meet the OP’s requirements with little to no code. For example, a service like Zapier could act as the intermediary between a subscription service and a Discourse forum. It could add and remove users from Discourse groups based on their subscriptions. I’m sure it could also be accomplished with Discourse/WordPress integration and a bit of custom development. From looking into this myself, it seems that potential legal issues might be more of a stumbling block than the the technical challenges of managing group memberships based on paid subscriptions. The organizations that I’m aware of that that are doing this kind of thing now (Youtube, Paetron, Substack, X/Twitter) likely have good legal teams. I’m unsure about the philosophical objections to monetizing access to groups/categories.

Stripe is the best platform I know of for something like that, there are many different options for how to categorize a fee for tax in different countries. This could work for if a creator is consistently publishing newsletters, artwork, or video presentations. There are different options for copyright options to be either limited or conditional rights. [stripe tax] [tax 2]

I’m not sure if this is getting off-topic, or exactly on-topic, but my understanding is that Stripe doesn’t function as the Merchant of Record (MoR.) There are other online payment processors that do function as the MoR. I’ll leave it to others to research the implications of that. This is the point where my head starts to spin and I start thinking that the technical aspects of monetizing group access are a lot less daunting than the legal aspects of it :slight_smile:

User monetization with group access?

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Falco (Falco) 12 בדצמבר,‏ 2019,‏ 4:24pm 5

A lot of people come up with this idea, but in the end any creator can have their own Discourse for $5 a month and skip the middleman fee. Which is a great thing, one of the core missions of Discourse is to promote decentralization on the web.

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User monetization with group access?

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