Gating the entire community

wes_catalyst

Does anyone gate their entire community? i.e. you can't see any community content unless you're signed in?

Is there any reason NOT to do this?

BrendanP

Many communities use a combination of both. Often ideation sections will be private. I personally believe the more sections that are publicly viewable the better. The reason being is that many community members are viewers/learners and it helps if they can check out the material and what's going on before joining.

Also, similar to @Rav Singh 's point, there's also an SEO element to communities that develop over time. SEO doesn't happen overnight but overtime that user generated content in your community is indexed by search engines and could lead to folks discovering your community or getting an answer to their question.

@wes_catalyst you may want to experiment with a feature called "private discussions" that shows a snippet of content but requires registration to view it all. Your CSM or Support could enable this for you.

Rav Singh

I guess it depends on the nature of your business, audience, goals and strategy.

In our case, our Community is product support focused so gating content would be a death knell and ultimately work against what/how we want to utilise the site but also how our audience is (and expects to) consume content.

With that said, we do have a couple of private categories within our Community open to specific user roles for specialised content and conversations that are not relevant for the wider member base.

wes_catalyst

Thanks @Rav Singh, I appreciate the insight. We're using the approval method for membership, and we do currently have some upcoming feature release discussions gated. But it feels like there's enough ungated that it may be hurting our registration numbers

BrendanP

Many communities use a combination of both. Often ideation sections will be private. I personally believe the more sections that are publicly viewable the better. The reason being is that many community members are viewers/learners and it helps if they can check out the material and what's going on before joining.

Also, similar to @Rav Singh 's point, there's also an SEO element to communities that develop over time. SEO doesn't happen overnight but overtime that user generated content in your community is indexed by search engines and could lead to folks discovering your community or getting an answer to their question.

@wes_catalyst you may want to experiment with a feature called "private discussions" that shows a snippet of content but requires registration to view it all. Your CSM or Support could enable this for you.

wes_catalyst

@BrendanP I appreciate the context about the SEO element. It was something I hadn't considered. We're definitely in a ramping up phase where we'd like to tease content, but continue to get people registered. So I think Private Discussions would be a great solution.

Our CSM just transitioned out, so I can reach out to Support. But is there any documentation on Private Discussions before I contact them? I searched here but only found some mentions in Release Notes

BrendanP

There doesn't seem to be a document on it as it's seldom used but I've asked our docs team about that.

This pretty much explains it however: