How to force existing users to accept ToS

[markschmucker (Mark S)]

There have been discussions of how to make new users accept terms of service as part of the signup process (links below). But what if you have many existing users and need them to explicitly accept the new ToS?

How to make users to explicitly agree to ToS

It’s one of the GDPR requirements in Europe - the ToS acceptance must be an explicit act (like marking a checkbox), not an effect of a separate action (like pressing the sign up). Is it possible with the SSO?

Security for underage users

I’m excited about your take on forums structure and organization of online communities. I’m considering using it in the near future for an educational community for children, where children aged 6-17 would be the main users, perhaps a few thousand of them. Naturally I worry about their online safety, and how Discourse could be used to an advantage over existing forums. For simplicity considering an all-private discourse forum, what security features are there to keep dangerous people away? Su…

[HAWK]

One option would be to create a new topic with the terms that you want them to accept and use Discourse Policy to enforce acceptance.

[markschmucker (Mark S)]

I considered using Discourse Policy- in fact @RGJ wrote a plugin for us long ago that adds members to a group based on accepting a policy. We require that users accept the policy in order to gain access to a premium group and category. But now I need to make it so they can’t see anything until they have accepted the new ToS. I don’t see how to use Discourse Policy to do that. We have thousands of users.

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

@markschmucker

But now I need to make it so they can’t see anything until they have accepted the new ToS

Just make all categories accessible to the accepted-the-tos group only?

[markschmucker (Mark S)]

Yes, I guess that would work. So in every category’s permissions, replace “everyone” with “accepted-the-tos” group. (Except for the ToS category or some way to find it.)

[rishabh]

@markschmucker

So in every category’s permissions, replace “everyone” with “accepted-the-tos” group. (Except for the ToS category or some way to find it.)

On that note, you can hide categories but offer a preview using Category Previews.

[markschmucker (Mark S)]

Just to close the loop for any future visitors, using Policy with Discourse’s built-in ToS doesn’t work. So you would need to create a new topic like “My Other ToS” and use Policy on that.

Discourse Policy plugin does not work with Terms of Service

I’m afraid the policy plugin doesn’t currently support working with ToS or other published pages. This would make a great feature request though.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

To require acceptance of a terms-of-service, use a required custom user field.

When defining a user field, you can select “Field Requirement” as “For all users”. When you do so, all new and existing users will be prompted to fill the custom field.