This is tricky. You’re certainly not the only one who has run into this, and it does often happen a bit later in a community’s life, so it’s understandable that your earlier success is what has led you to this new problem.
There isn’t really any built-in way to create a group that has less permissions that “everyone”.
I think what you’ve to do is
- Create a new group for most of your users, e.g.
@members - Add all existing users to that group
- (Optional) Add these new users to a different group, e.g.
@guests - Update category permissions to define which ones have a given level of access for
@membersvs.@guests
It may take a little elbow grease, but you could find some ways to make this easier to do in bulk.
For example, the CSV created by export users contains a column for group names, and the bulk invite feature also uses a CSV with group names to add users to groups.
It’d take a bit of data munging to get it right, but it should be doable. I’d recommend starting with a small test CSV file first with only a subset of users (1 or 2 at time) to ensure things work as expected, before doing this for everyone.
Roughly many users, groups, and categories do you currently have?