Configuring and managing the sign-up flow with user approval

[Discourse]

This guide explains the sign-up process when the “must approve users” setting is enabled, including configuration steps and the user experience.

Required user level: Administrator

When you want to control who can join your Discourse community, you can enable a setting that requires new users to be approved before they can log in. This feature is commonly used for private communities or public forums that want to limit participation.

Configuring user approval

To set up user approval for your Discourse site:

1. Enable the must_approve_users site setting.
   

   

   Note: When you enable this setting on an existing site, all existing users are automatically marked as approved. Only new registrations after this point will require approval.

2. (Optional) If you want to make your community private, enable the login_required site setting. This prevents anonymous users from viewing your forum’s content.

User sign-up process

Once you’ve enabled user approval, here’s what the sign-up process looks like for new users:

1. The user visits your forum and clicks the “Sign Up” button.
   

   

2. The user enters their account details and receives an activation email.

3. After activating their email, the user sees this message on the forum:

   Welcome to Discourse!

   A moderator must manually approve your new account before you can access this forum. You’ll get an email when your account is approved!

   If the user attempts to log in before approval, they’ll see this message:

   Your account hasn’t been approved yet. You will be notified by email when you are ready to log in.

Moderator approval process

1. Moderators receive on-site notifications for pending user approvals.

2. If a request remains in the review queue, a reminder private message is sent to moderators who haven’t yet seen a previous reminder. The reminder is managed by the PendingUsersReminder background job, which runs every 5 minutes but can be delayed using the pending_users_reminder_delay_minutes site setting (default: 480 minutes).

3. Once a staff member approves a user, the user receives an email notification.
   

   

Additional resources

• Configuring Discourse for a closed or private community

Last edited by @hugh 2024-07-05T01:35:58Z

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