Curiosity about private communities

luceos

Working on some stuff for Blomstra I noticed that our ratio of public vs private content currently leans heavily into private content on our Greenhouse (that's what we call our community 🙂 ). Using private staff tags to build up governance drafts and discussions really helps.

Of the communities you have, do any of those also lean towards a closed off/private community than a public one? I'm curious as we have extensions like doorman and the native permission system to close off content, but perhaps there's some creativity that can be applied somewhere in the future to create further contrast between what is public and private?

For instance, what Zammad (our ticket system) does is create this border that identifies a post as private. But something similar could be done with all pages under a private tag 🤔 Like creating a different page background or hero?

katos

luceos interesting concept to create a separate area for private topics, almost like a premium / VIP area, coupled with your payments extension I could see this being really interesting.

We currently hide a couple of things at CreatorsWave; for one - our resources are members-only (soon to be changed to downloadable by members, but topics visible to all). We also have a private discussions for liaison with the team, such as where details are shared for our Flarum install help service.

m4v3rick

luceos For instance, what Zammad (our ticket system) does is create this border that identifies a post as private. But something similar could be done with all pages under a private tag 🤔 Like creating a different page background or hero?

Sounds interesting to me.

I am administrating a forum for football fans.
Some of us met before games and were talking about football so we decided to build a forum and to put it on a solid base we founded a club. With the membership fees we pay the server and other costs. There are around 20 members who have a tag secured area inside the forum.
Aside from that we differ between visitors and forum members (who don't need to be club members).

For non forum members you are able to see quite a lot.
For forum members you are allowed to see special areas for discussing topics not related to football or not meant to be public.
For club members (who are of course forum members) there is another area with many discussions.

So the first barrier is to have a login and beyond that it depends on which group badges someone has.

In numbers there are around 20 club members, 350 forum members (including the club members) and around 20k unique visitors within 10 months, 400 discussions and 170k posts.

We tried doorman, but registration is free for everyone now. We have a mod team doing the rest.

Lukeman

luceos Our forum is 100% private and is solely used for a game we organise once a year. Registration is closed, all members are registered by the mods. Only 1 tag is visible for all members, other tags can only be viewed by the participants of the game of that particular year (e.g. 2020).
The mods have a tag of their own which is not viewable by anyone else.
We are happy with the way Flarum behaves, it suits all our needs at the moment. Especially since it's possible to view the memberslist in the admin area which is a great addition.

tolgaaaltas

luceos Greenhouse

Does this name create copyright issues? Spotify's podcast service also uses this name.

Edit: Sorry, it's called Greenroom. My bad.

luceos

katos like a primary tag based custom modification of the theme/template/design 🤤

wonderbeel

Currently no but some years ago I helped with a 99% private community, basically it was used to organize groupbuys of niche tech stuff between fellow nerds (because it was private basically you could enter only if you were a trustable guy, the idea was to avoid scams or random people like on facebook groups).
It is one use case where forums outshine everything else, we tried to organize with telegram groups and a discord server but their IM nature encourage people to spam a lot, on a board instead there is a sort of psychological filter to just write all the relevant data without too much fluff and for things that can drag for months/years it is crucial.
We also had a public area with a sort of wiki/recap of various disadventures (like "seller X is a scammer avoid it" or "seller Y has good stuff but it is super slow, avoid it if you can't wait months for your springs") and to distinguish between public/private areas we just had an huge banner "you are in the private area, if you want to organize a purchase do it here", IIRC we initially put a javascript alert to notify the users that they were in the private area but it was too invasive, maybe it could be a good idea to notify them when they are entering/leaving the private area in a cleaner way.

ornanovitch

Interesting subject you got there luceos 👍️

The forum I administrate is an example of an extremely closed community:

nothing is public, you must at least be a member
by default, members have access to two different tags: a general tag and a what's new + everybody have access to byobu
next we have a dozen of closed tags (1 tag per group): you must request the access if I forget to assign you. Majority of our members belong to multiple of these groups

Why all that: because our forum is meant to be a mirror of our social group of friends IRL, which is composed of multiple groups, formal (non-profit org.) and informal (brewers, choirs and music groups, political stuff...), who use the forum to organize themselves better and to share information.

(yes we use doorman!)

ctml

This idea reminds be a bit about groups, because they could be public or private and content can be organized within it as opposed to a tag.

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/28311-can-you-add-a-function-similar-to-facebook-group/14

Darkle

ctml About this, when the time comes I will contact you to talk about it, but at the moment I have been planning an extension for my project for a few months and I still don't know the budget, that's why I don't want to commit myself until I am sure of everything.

Ralkage

There are also hybrid forums that only allow you to see certain content in discussions/posts by signing up or logging in by using extensions such as Login2SeePlus. It ideally still leaves the forum public, but some content is hidden until the user signs up and logs in 🙂 the flexibility of Flarum is absolutely astronomical at this point, which is why I keep coming back for more 😍