Publicly viewable spaces with approval required to join?
Is it possible to have a space where everyone can view the space and its posts, but users must request to join and be approved by an admin before they can post or interact, maybe ‘like’ but not comment?
Ideally, the flow would be:
- Non-members can view the space and its content.
- A Request to Join is shown.
- An admin/moderator approves or declines the request.
- Once approved, the user can post and interact normally.
At the moment, it seems that Public spaces allow users to join freely, while Private spaces provide controlled membership but restrict the content from non-members.
Is there currently a way to combine public visibility with approval-based membership, or could this be considered as a feature?
Hi there!
You bring up a great point. Currently, Fluent Community doesn't have a native feature that combines public visibility with an approval-based "Request to Join" flow. If a space is public, anyone can join and post immediately.
I actually ran into a very similar issue on my own forum. I wanted to keep the discussions visible to everyone, but I needed strict control over what gets published to prevent spam and maintain the quality of the posts.
Since we can't moderate the memberships for public spaces yet, I developed a custom plugin that moderates the content instead.
How it works: When a user publishes a post in a space, my plugin intercepts it and automatically sets its status to "Pending". The post will not be visible on the front end until an Admin or Moderator explicitly approves it.
It might not be the exact "user-approval" flow you are looking for, but it solves the core problem: it gives you 100% control over what appears in your public spaces.
I've made this plugin open-source. If you think this workaround would be useful for your community, just let me know and I'd be happy to share the GitHub repository with you!
Hope this helps!
Übeydullah Ekin It’s a good idea, but what about their comments too?
Time-wise, once you reach 50+ posts a day, it becomes unrealistic to manually review every post being submitted to your spaces.
I already have businesses that I’m perfectly happy to have posting on their own wall, but they constantly post promotional content into the spaces instead.
And if the solution is to make the spaces private, doesn’t that mean all of the useful content inside those spaces is then hidden from the wider community and visitors?
There really needs to be a way to keep spaces publicly viewable while controlling who can post in them.
This feels like a no-brainer for a future update.
David Freeman You make very valid points.
My plugin is just a temporary fix for smaller communities—manual moderation definitely doesn't scale once you hit 50+ posts a day. I also agree that making spaces private ruins discoverability.
Your feature request is exactly what we need for scaling, and I really hope the Fluent team implements it soon.
Shahjahan Jewel any chance of this option on an update? ✔️ 🙏