[Solved] Limited Access Forums

If you have two forums (cat, forum or subforum), say Forum 1 and Forum 2 and two users User 1 and User 2. You can do this configuration to make a user specific access forums:

1. Create a Company 1 Usergroup and attach User 1 to this group (Dashboard > Forums > Usergroup)

2. Create a Company 2 Usergroup and attach User 2 to this group (Dashboard > Forums > Usergroup)

3. Edit Forum 1 and set permissions:

• Admin - Full Access
• Moderator - Moderator
• Customer - No Access
• Registered No Access
• Guests - No access
• Company 1 - Standard Access
• Company 2 - No Access

4. Edit Forum 2 and set permissions:

• Admin - Full Access
• Moderator - Moderator
• Customer - No Access
• Registered No Access
• Guests - No access
• Company 1 - No Access
• Company 2 - Standard Access

If I have free and premium users, how do you recommend accepting payment for the premium users? Any plugin recommendations that work well with WPforo?

Hi @mikegrecomba,

First you should make sure your paid membership plugin is based on user roles. So the membership plans/levels should be based on User Roles to allow it be integrated with wpForo. wpForo is based on its own Usergroups, and that Usergroups are synced with WordPress User Roles. This allow to get correct access in forum based on User Roles. Once the paid membership plugin changes the user role to some member role it automatically gets according Usergroup and Forum Access in forum. This also works in vice versa.

Please note that WP User Roles like subscriber, contributes, author, editor, etc don't have any affection in forum accesses. They are not used in forum. They are synches with forum Usergroups. And forum Usergroups are used to get different accesses to different forums. Please follow the steps below to see wpForo Usergroups and Forum Accesses...

Step 1: Understand that in forum there is no Roles like Subscriber or so. wpForo has Usergroups for this purpose. And each Usergroup is synced with WP User Roles. For example Subscribers are the same users with  Registered Usergroup. The Registered Usergroup is the same Subscriber User Role. You can see that they are synced together in Forums > Usergroups admin page. So saying Subscriber Role you should understand Registered Usergroup in wpForo Forum.

Step 2: wpForo forums have permission settings in Edit Forum screen. Edit the forum and use these settings to control Usergroup accesses and privileges in that forum. Each Usergroup has some Forum Access set in each forum. For example The Registered Usergroup ( Subscriber User Role) has Standard Forum Access by default in all forums. You just need to set Read Only forum access for Registered usergroup that forum. Then navigate to Dashboard > Forums > Dashboard and click on [Delete all caches] button.

Step 3: Understand the Forum Accesses. Forum Accesses are set of forum permissions. For example, you just selected "Read Only" access for Registered usergroup. You can find all permissions of Read Only access in Dashboard > Settings > Forum Access > Read Only (edit) screen. You can see that "Can create topic" and "Can post reply" permissions are disabled for this forum access. So your users with Registered Usergroup (Subscribers) will not be able to post create a topic or reply in that forum.

Step 4: Secondary Usergroups have the same power like the Primary Usergroup. It allows to set multiple Usergroups to the same user. For example if Usergroup A has access to Forum A and Usergroup B has access to Forum B and you want User AB to have accesses to both Forum A and B you should set User AB primary Usergroup A and Secondary Usergroup B or vice versa.

More info in this topic: https://wpforo.com/community/how-to-and-troubleshooting-2/wpforo-and-restrict-content-pro/#post-21427