The discussion revolves around making a Discourse site partially public while maintaining moderation control. lewisg asks if it’s possible to keep the site private but allow public viewing of one category, with only registered users able to post and have their posts approved by moderators. awesomerobot explains that this can be achieved by setting the category’s visibility to ‘everyone’ and restricting other categories to ‘trust_level 0’, with a video guide provided here. pfaffman clarifies that only registered users can post by default. lewisg then asks about post approval, and awesomerobot confirms that posts can be approved by setting the ‘approve unless trust level’ to Trust Level 4, ensuring all posts require moderator approval.
We currently require all users to create an account before being able to view anything but are being asked more and more about making the site open to public viewing.
So in an attempt to ensure that the site remains fully moderated we would like to be able to keep the site private (for now) and make one category public (as a trial) but ensure that only registered users can post and have those posts approved by moderators.
Is this something that could be accomplished or does anyone have a more simple way of trialling this?
Yes, each category has a security tab within its settings so you could set one category to be viewable by “everyone” and restrict all other categories to “trust_level 0” — which is a group all registered users belong to.
We have a video that explains how to setup permissions:
Yep, there’s a approve unless trust level setting that you can adjust. You can set it to Trust Level 4 (which can only be manually granted) and then all users would need posts approved.