When a patron’s pledge is declined or deleted, is their access to patron-only discourse forum automatically suspended or do I as admin need to do that? And if suspended or deleted, is the user sent a message about the details of the suspension or deletion?
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around the automatic suspension or deletion of users when their Patreon pledge is declined or deleted. dax clarifies that users are removed from the Patreon group and lose access to patron-only forums, but are not notified about the suspension or deletion.
When a user’s pledge is declined or deleted, they are synced out of the group automatically, and no manual measures are needed by the admin. If the site only logs in with Patreon, users who are no longer patrons will simply no longer be able to log in without any warning or notification.
However, caduspa found an issue where a patron who deleted their pledge still had access to the patron-only Discourse forum. codinghorror suggests checking if the Discourse and Patreon plugin are fully up to date.
rking and vinothkannans point out that the issue might be due to the forum setup and category restrictions. They advise setting category restrictions to “Patrons” group to keep patron-only content exclusive.
caduspa confirms that this was the issue and edits the security settings to resolve it.
The user is removed from the Patreon group and therefore no longer has access to the forum (if the forum is only for Patrons).
I really do not think so.
The best thing for me is to have a public category with permissions to @everyone just to reply and see (but not create) topics. In that category, you will write only one topic (you decide how to set it) and your non-patrons users who will access the site will only see that topic (and will have the opportunity to reply in case of problems or to ask questions).
Your patrons belonging to the patreon group will have access to the real contents of the site.
Thanks. So to be clear, the user will have access and I don’t need to take any measures. Also, are they notified or do they just find they can’t log in? Thank so much for your help.
Users are synced to the group/s (added and removed) automatically, so you do not have to do anything.
If your site only logs in with Patreon, users who are no longer Patrons will simply no longer be able to log in (no warning or notification).
What I wrote before was a workaround for notifications.
Following up on this topic, it appears a patron who deleted their pledge now has access to the patron-only Discourse forum. She posted today after having deleted her pledge July 24th and her profile on Patreon confirms no payments since July. Any ideas how she may be accessing as a non-patron?`
Is your discourse and the patreon plugin fully up to date?
Thanks for responding. Yes, as far as I know. Plus, kudos on the super eye-catching Avatar!
How is your forum set up - is the entire thing restricted to patrons, or do you have restrictions set on every category?
It’s only fully automatic for the second case; for the first case you need to forcibly log out their browsers.
If your website is login protected by Patreon but the categories are not restricted then non pledging Patrons can also access its content. Category restriction is very important to keep Patron only contents as exclusive. You should only add “Patrons” group (and other allowed groups if any) in restricted categories.
Optionally you can create an unrestricted category for non-pledging Patrons.
That was exactly the issue. Thanks for the information and I’ve now edited all categories’ security settings to ‘patrons’. Thanks for the help!