How to give unpaid users limited access without making Discourse private?

[jajabor]

I’m planning to build a paid membership community with Discourse. Is it possible to have paid members with read/write access, while unpaid members to have only read (or limited read) access.

e.g.
Unregistered user: Look at topics, categories, search, can’t read what’s inside the topics.
Registered user (paid): All access.

Or do you suggest I keep the group private and make a one-pager frontend landing page with a dynamic list of topic title, categories etc. (which is searchable).

Why I’m trying to do this?

1. To give people a glimpse of what they can expect by paying for membership. See before you buy approach.
2. Not to lose out on SEO from the topics created. This should be a funnel for new users who will discover the community from search.

Please guide me.

[ondrej]

Hello @jajabor

Have you seen this plugin. I think it offers what you are after?

Discourse Subscriptions

Summary: Discourse Subscriptions allows site owners to sell recurring and one-time purchase subscriptions that grant access to a group on a Discourse instance. GitHub: https://github.com/discourse/discourse-subscriptions Install: Follow the plugin installation guide. Features [image] Discourse Subscriptions supports the following features: Create new products and plans from the admin panel Cancel and refund subscriptions from the admin panel Create one time p…

[jajabor]

Actually, Stripe only supports credit cards in my country while leaving out a whole lot of other options my target audience is comfortable using. E.g. netbanking, Google Pay etc. So I am planning to use a 3rd party payment gateway to fulfil that part of the problem.

Is there a way to integrate 3rd party payment gateway instead of Stripe?

[Krunnie]

You could try to use the Discourse Patreon plugin. It supports more than one payment option and it’d give you essentially the same thing as the other plugin.

[jajabor]

Thanks for the suggestion. But I’m not keen on using Patreon since they will take commission for adding no functionality that i intend to use.

Is it possible to make Discourse semi-private, by limiting non-registered users to see only the topics + 3 posts per topic. To view the rest of the post (4th post onward), they need to sign up. And I’ll somehow enable payment during sign up.

Please guide.

[rosano]

i don’t have a lot of experience with discourse but i’m interested in this question for my own 3rd-party membership system. i always imagined you would manually or automatically set metadata on forum accounts and update it periodically via webhooks.