This guide explains the sign-up process when the “must approve users” setting is enabled, including configuration steps and the user experience.
Required user level: Administrator
When you want to control who can join your Discourse community, you can enable a setting that requires new users to be approved before they can log in. This feature is commonly used for private communities or public forums that want to limit participation.
(Optional) If you want to make your community private, enable the login_required site setting. This prevents anonymous users from viewing your forum’s content.
User sign-up process
Once you’ve enabled user approval, here’s what the sign-up process looks like for new users:
The user visits your forum and clicks the “Sign Up” button.
The user enters their account details and receives an activation email.
After activating their email, the user sees this message on the forum:
Welcome to Discourse!
A moderator must manually approve your new account before you can access this forum. You’ll get an email when your account is approved!
If the user attempts to log in before approval, they’ll see this message:
Your account hasn’t been approved yet. You will be notified by email when you are ready to log in.
Moderator approval process
Moderators receive on-site notifications for pending user approvals.
If a request remains in the review queue, a reminder email is sent to all users with full Moderator status. The reminder email is managed by the PendingUsersReminder background job, which runs hourly but can be delayed using the pending users reminder delay site setting.
Once a staff member approves a user, the user receives an email notification.
All existing users are be marked as approved when you turn on that setting.
would it be possible to update the screengrab in the documentation above:
to remove the warning, like the screengrab at:
Possibly also adding the text “All existing users are marked as approved when you turn on the must_approve_users setting.” to the documentation to clarify the outcome.
As a moderator, I used to get messages in the discourse ‘inbox’ when here were new users who needed to be reviewed. Now they are coming in as topics in my ‘Staff’ category. I’d prefer them to be messages and not clutter up my list of new topics in ‘Staff’. How do I accomplish that?
Can you share some more details? I tried to reproduce that, but the pending user reminder PM was still sent to the most recently active moderators.
I thought maybe you were talking about the reminder about pending reviewables, but that isn’t posted in the staff category either. It’s sent to the inbox of the moderator group.
Thanks for getting back to me. Here is a screenshot of what my staff category looks like right now. All the “new user .. requires review” messages are what I want to end up in my inbox instead of as topics in the staff category. I’m new to discourse, so probably I have set some setting that did this, I just can’t figure out what I did.
These don’t look like the required review messages from Discourse core.
Those look like this
Yours look like this
User X has just registered an account to the Fornax Science Console
New user Y registration request requires review for access to the Fornax Science Console
You seem to use openid-connect instead of the Discourse registration flow. So I don’t think this documentation topic is any help for you. The messages you see are not related to must_approve_users.
This guide explains the sign-up process when the “must approve users” setting is enabled, including configuration steps and the user experience.
Required user level: Administrator
These don’t look like the required review messages from Discourse core.