Sharing content from a members-only community

[Joachim Sandstrom]

Hi.

We are running a members-only community from which we would like to share individual topics or posts. Possible implementations:

1) Member could share her individual topic/post on social media. Guest following link back access just that specific topic/post

2) Member -"- other member’s individual topic/post -"- 

3) Moderators managing 1 and 2 above for topics/posts of their choice

Has anyone solved how to do this, or has any ideas on how to - without adding 3rd party solutions?
 

/Joachim

 

[Marc Stridgen]

There is no way in which to do this within the core platform. The only option for this is 3rd party development

[Joachim Sandstrom]

Is it possible to copy, not move, a post from one forum to another? (We haven't found any solution on this in the IPB guides or in the support forum.) Such functionality would  open up for a solution.

[Marc Stridgen]

Unfortunately not. What you are looking for there is quite a unique thing. Generally duplicating content would be seen as a bad thing.

Could I ask here, if you are thinking of duplicating it elsewhere, what the difference is to them seeing the original?

I guess what Im asking here, is what are you trying to achieve?

[Joachim Sandstrom]

Assuming a paid member-only forum.
Posted Social Media links shouldn't and wouldn't work for the guests using them. We obviously don’t want to grant read-rights to all the content, just chosen posts. Since there aren’t privileges on the post level, but on the forum level, we could make the chosen posts visible for guests by copying them to a separate dedicated open-to-guests forum. We don’t want to move the posts since this would drain the paid forum.

But since there is no copy function this workaround does not work.

All workaround proposals are welcome.

/Joachim

[Jim M]

Unfortunately, as you mentioned, permissions are not at the post-level but forum-level. Additionally, the software was not built to have content in 2 places for 2 different userbases (as Marc mentioned. I am not aware of a way to accomplish this via third party existing tools so this might need to be custom if its something you need).

Therefore, you have two options really:

1. You tailor your forums to what you want your guests to see. If it's content X but not content A, B, C... then that would need to be tailored in your forum category decisions.
2. If you don't want to give guests access to all content in a forum, you may wish to not allow guest access at all but rather provide free trials. Then via Pages (our CMS application) write your own marketing content which would entice (based on some sample content that you screenshot or copy into your marketing material) your guests to go sign up for a trial and that free or minimally priced trial will expire so you are not providing endless content to anyone forever. This option would not, however, allow you to post topics to social media directly because guests would need to login to read it but would allow you to promote the content via your marketing material.

There are some third party add-ons out there (Please note, these would only be supported by their authors so you would want to contact them to verify their features and their support):

• That go a bit deeper with permissions and put them on the topics.
• Limit the number of topics a guest can view. While this may be enticing, I would not recommend this as if you intend to leverage guest viewing so that search engines can index your content. As this will impact you negatively.

 

[opentype]

The only stock option I can think of: Pages blocks have the ability to ignore permissions. So, one could create topic/feed blocks to let guests see snippets from the closed areas. 

Other than that it sounds like a job for a custom app.