Thanks @denvergeeks, but this is not on a paid subscription plan - everything comes out of my own pocket (except when offset by ccasional small contributions from members).
So you are self-hosting?
Thanks @Nathank
Yes, have now installed that Custom Wizard plugin, though no success so far in getting it to do what I want.
The functions that seem most applicable are marked as being for subscribers only, I canât rule out alternative approaches - but so far no elegant solutions that deal with the complexity involved in identifying people with the qualifying characteristics of a private forum member (as established via drop down / multi select custom field) while filtering out everyone else as public forum applicants
Perhaps I donât even try - maybe I just manually attribute the group membership according to the applicant responses received., when approving sign ups. (An ugly sign up experience for the public though)
There is also
Yeah, you are right. Youâd need a free community subscription to use those features (especially Add to group), which adds to the pfaff a bit. But still doable.
Thanks @nathank .
I have submitted an application for free community subscription - will see how that goes.
Must admit to being a bit nervous about becoming permanently dependant on a plugin that could change its âfreeâ policy at any time. Is there an escape route if it does?
Sort of; if the subscription lapses for any reason, the Wizard will still work; just changes to that subscriber feature will be locked.
Looking back up this thread, it is odd that you couldnât make the automation work. That sounds like a significant bug - and I can reproduce it.
With your use-case it might be better to advocate for that to be fixed, and view the Custom Wizard Plugin as a workaround.
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My use case is also similar. Iâm creating a private (in my case paid) community, but I want to allow visitors to be able to create an account and see limited (teaser) content without paying. (No anonymous access, so Iâve set login required.)
When you get everything sorted, @Paul_King would you mind summing up the plugins you end up using, the set-up you end up using including automations and validations (etc), and any gotchas? Thank you in advance.
@nathank Am I understanding correctly that if I have a Visitors group and a (paid) Members group, I can simply restrict access to categories by changing the âeveryoneâ security setting? (And being careful to check all sub-categories also, because security settings do not inherit? â Something I learned yesterday, which was not intuitive and potentially dangerous! Subcategory does not inherit security settings) In particular, trust levels will not rise for Visitors such that they could ever give themselves more access, correct?
Also @nathank, what does this mean?
Do you mean that a Member could not cross-link (at all) from one Member category to another if itâs (at all, i.e. Member) security restricted? Thatâs a hefty price to pay!
Iâm re-considering at this point whether itâs worth it to try allowing for logged in Visitors, for the sake of getting leads.
@denvergeeks Since my community will be paid, maybe I could upgrade my hosting to get access to the Discourse Subscriptions plugin. I was planning to use ThriveCart since my courses (optional, external to the community) will be paid for through there anyway, and I can then bundle courses, coaching, community membership, etc. and keep all financial transactions in one place.
Yes, it is as simple as that.
You canât grant access to a subcategory unless the group also has access to the parent category; this protects against the danger you highlight nicely.
It isnât that bad - you can still link just fine, but the nice pretty Oneboxes wonât generate.
Unfortunately, out of the box it only integrates with Stripe. Otherwise it would be ideal for you.
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Thanks @nathank I have posted this as a bug.
Meanwhile, part of my process will require that all existing users are automatically allocated a âprivate forumâ group membership for the private forum (until now, I have not explicitly been using groups at all, and the forum has been private by default). I canât see an obvious way to do this that doesnât involve sending (redundant) invites to join, and a requirement for every existing forum user to respond, just to retain access.
I have a horrible sinking feeling that the only way to achieve this automatically is via some nasty Data Explorer query
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Yes, self-hosting on Digital Ocean
No need to sink!
If you have a list of your usernames or emails (e.g. from the Export via /admin/users), you can can simply copy and paste this into the 
bit of the Group page.
Easy peasy!
From memory, it struggles if you have over 1000 users. But you should be okay.
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Thanks @nathank
Looking at the dialog, as worded it does read a bit like that might just create invites for those users, rather than actually shifting them?
It is clever enough to add those with existing accounts, and send invites to those who donât.
I know because I requested it! But yes, the copy could be better, eh?
Go and test it with a couple of test users.
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Thanks @nathank. It worked just as you said, and yes it is quite clever!
Happily recognized a windows clipboard copy of a cleaned up column of email addresses from Excel as comma delimited when I pasted into the dialog.
In my case I got âError 502â quite a lot even with pasting in just 500 users at a time - seems like this is a server bottleneck issue (my hosting plan has limitations on network and cpu utilisation).
Reducing that to 200 users at a time pretty much consistently worked, though if I left it longer between batches, I could get away with a few more at a time.
My next step now to now somehow get some sort of two way synchronising link between custom user field variable for âPrivate Forumâ to implement or prevent access to the group âPrivate forumâ. Still no luck doing this via Discourse Automation.
Right now a test account signing up who ticks only the âpublic forumâ box still gets full access to both.
My new custom user fields for Public and Private forum access also appear in user profiles, which might be a source of confusion, particularly since existing users have these fields unpopulated.
It might be better if the field was visible only to admins, or was grayed out for public forum only users
What would help a lot is for there to be a way for the forum administrator to directly nominate or override the accessible user group(s) and thus categories assigned to the user, while first approving the users - all from the same âApprove Userâ dialog.
in fact the whole user profile should probably be editable from this dialog - to allow clean up of identified user errors in custom user fields.
Currently the only way tidy up profile issues on sign up seems to involve a lot of jumping around to other areas in addition to approving the user - with significantly higher risk of error or mission on the part of the administrator as a result.
OK, an update
I finally got Discourse Automation to work - the trick was to use a drop down custom user field type (even though the instructions donât spell this out) rather than the tick box field type I had started with. The drop down options need to correspond exactly to the full user group names
Very important - ensure this new field is not user-editable after sign up, otherwise a user signing up and being approved only for the public forum can later just unilaterally grant themselves themselves acess to the private forum.
