I run a small private forum for architects, but would like to add an area accessible to the public, that the architect users can monitor, where laypeople can ask questions or contribute their own perspectives to discussions that are made open to the public.
The idea is that members of the public see only public discussions, while architect users see both private and public discussions.
Members of the public should preferably have a different sign up experience, as there are a lot of custom fields for architect member sign ups that would not be relevant, and should have fewer options from their control panel settings (for example I don’t want to offer the public the same mail-list functionality available to architect members), and public users should not ever be be able to elevate their trust settings in such a way that private area content becomes exposed to them.
I don’t want to create two completely separate forums, as this would presumably trigger the need for two domains, double costs, and add the difficulty of keeping architect user memberships synchronised between forums as they come and go.
I think you can do something like this using the Custom Wizard Plugin 🧙. Choose if you are an architect or not and it will give a different signup pathway. I had this plugin 3-4 years ago so I don’t really recall all the features that well.
Sadly, looks like that plugin would cost $US 50 per month to have any conditional functionality (which is what I would need, if I have understood correctly) - trebling the current cost of hosting the whole forum - which all comes out of my personal pocket.
I think the most of these available with: groups, categories permission, custom user fields and automation.
To separate users on signup use Discourse Authentication Validations chaining user fields function. So you can show separate user fields depends on what they choose on the first option ( architect or laypeople. )
After this, with Discourse Automation you can automatically add these users to the expected group.
For example:
User Field Option
Group
architect →
architect
laypeople →
laypeople
Finally set up the categories permissions for these groups.
architect group can see architect and laypeople categories
laypeople group can see laypeople categories
Something like this maybe can help and add some idea.
