Registration

While in many cases it may be desirable to allow anyone who can access the forum to be allowed to register -for example in forums that are entirely public, or in those that run behind a company's firewall- there are a number of cases where more fine-grained control is needed. This page describes what options are available for that.

Under Admin -> Configurations you can turn new registrations on or off entirely with Enable registration of new users .

Under Admin -> Email and Domains you can control who is allowed to register, and what they are allowed to do and see, based on their email address. This is available from JForum 2.8 forward.

[RestrictedForumsAndCategories] has additional information on how to allow or restrict which forums a particular user group can or can not access.

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Case 1: Allow anyone with an example.com email to register

Under Admin -> Email and Domains , add "example.com" in the Email field, and click Add. Now folks from Example Corp. can register. But as long as Enable registration of new users whose email or domain is not explicitly listed is checked under Admin -> Configurations, so can everybody else. There are two ways to handle this: You can turn that setting off, thus preventing anyone else from registering. Or you can use set the User group for new users whose email or domain is not explicitly listed, which is under Admin -> Configurations as well, to another group - maybe create a Guest group. Then you can set for each forum whether it should be accessible only to company employees or to everyone. You could also do it the other way around - assign company employees to a group Internal, and put everyone else into General. In this context the user with the ID 1 called Anonymous is important. That is used if the forum is accessed by someone who is not logged in - so make sure that user is in a group that does not have access to anything private.

If your company uses several domains for its email -maybe also example.org- then you can simply add another entry on the Emails and Domains page.

You can extend this scheme in several ways: Employees from different countries -and thus different email domains- can each have their own content, as well as access to content that's visible to everybody. Some institutions -like universities- may provide their students with their own email address. In this case you can set up different forums - public (visible by everyone), students and faculty, and faculty-only.

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Case 2: Allow club members to register

In this case you have a fixed number of people you want to allow access, but they can have all kinds of email addresses. So you need to enter their addresses one by one, and assign them to whatever group you're using to show private forums - let's say Member. Then you can still keep user Anonymous assigned to General, so you can have a forum that contains public information for anyone to read (but allows club members to post to), Make sure to set User group for new users whose email or domain is not explicitly listed to false, so no one whose address isn't listed can register (unless you want other people to register, and then participate in the public forums).