Status: Available Understand exactly what a new member goes through, from sign-up to their first post, so you can support them when they get stuck.
Joining your community is a few short steps: sign up, verify the email, then complete a 3-step onboarding. Here's each part and where members can get held up.
Step 1: Sign up
Members sign up with an email and password. There's no "log in with Google" or other social login, so everyone creates an account this way. Anyone can sign up on their own; there's no approval queue.
Step 2: Verify the email
After signing up, the member gets a verification email. They can't log in until they click the link and verify. Until then their account stays unverified.
If a member says they never got the email, they can request it again from the sign-in screen, and they can reset a forgotten password from there too.
Step 3: Complete onboarding (3 steps)
Once verified and logged in, the member is walked through three short steps before they can take part:
- Welcome: a short intro screen that shows your welcome message.
- Profile: they add their first and last name, an avatar, and a short bio. These are required.
- Community guidelines: they read and accept your community guidelines with a checkbox.
You set the welcome message and the guidelines yourself in Community Settings > Community Content (/admin/content/cs_content). If your guidelines are empty, every new member gets stuck on step 3 and can't finish onboarding, so make sure they're filled in.
What onboarding does and doesn't gate
Onboarding gates taking part. It does not gate looking around.
- Before finishing onboarding, a member can still browse freely: the feed, public content, your landing page, and so on.
- After finishing onboarding, they can post, comment, react, message, join groups, and the rest.
So if a member can read but can't post or comment, the usual reason is they haven't finished onboarding yet.
There's no plan selection in onboarding
Onboarding does not ask members to pick a plan or pay for anything. Choosing a product or plan is a separate purchase step, not part of these three onboarding screens.