I’m migrating a private community from Ning to Discourse. I’m confused about how to onboard and manage our users.
Our Discourse is closed to the public (login required
).
Our users are all from specific higher ed instiutions, so in theory we could limit logins by domain. But I want to avoid using the email domains whitelist
option. We’ll almost certainly need to add users who have generic Gmail or other accounts at some point.
Since email domains whitelist
is out, we have to either use invites or approvals. AFAICT, these methods are incompatible. That is, if you allow regular users to send invitations, these will not be approved, which won’t work for our case.
So either we enable the invite only
option and restrict invitations to admins, or disable invitations altogether and use the must approve users
option instead.
I’m inclined to use invitations right now as that will allow us to invite users en masse. But, eventually we’ll be implementing SSO with our main site, which will prevent us from using invitations long-term.
Would I run into trouble if I used invites to onboard users to Discourse and then switch to approving them? Imported users are pre-approved. And, despite the warning about revoking access in the settings, I didn’t find this to be the case in my test site. Have I misunderstood how this works?
A related issue is that I want to import certain users – because they have posted some content – but who are no longer part of the community. So I don’t want them to be able to login to the site. How can I have inactive users? I don’t see how to do this at all. I thought about enabling approvals and “un-approving” these users, but I don’t see an option to do so.
Any help figuring any of this out would be much appreciated.