How can staff interact with not-yet-approved users?

support
1

Hi everyone, on our Discourse, which is for a group of professionals with approved credentials, we’d like to achieve the following in the signup and approval process:

  1. Users whose credentials haven’t been approved can’t view any content on our Discourse
  2. Unapproved users are able to contact staff (not just one person via email) on their way to becoming approved.
  3. Ideally, we’d like whatever documentation they send us to reside on Discourse.

The alternatives I’ve thought of so far are:

  1. Possible but not satisfactory: Set “login required” and include a message in their initial email address confirmation email, which instructs them to send an email with info we need to approve. This method makes it difficult for all staff to share the task, however, and it also doesn’t make it straightforward to store documentation on Discourse.
  2. Possible but prone to mistakes: Automatically approve new users, but make every category visible only to users who are members of the group “approved”. Not great, because staff may forget to set new categories up that way.
  3. Possibly impossible? Automatically approve new users, but somehow restrict them from viewing any posts, and from doing anything at all except for exchanging messages with staff. Potentially by altering how tl0 works. This would be the smoothest way, and satisfies all three requirements, but is it feasible?

Grateful for any suggestions!

2

It is not, no.

The only way around would be category/group permissions as you describe in 2.

There is no way to allow someone to interact with you without an account. You could customise your login form so that people are required to let you know what kind of documentation they will be providing, and give them an email address to send it to (from their registration email address). You could then match that up with the registrations.

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3

Thank you. Is there a way (plugin, perhaps?) to cause the default permissions of new categories to only be viewable by members of an approved group, rather than “everyone: Create/Reply/See”?

4

Not that I’m aware of (but that doesn’t make it gospel).

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