You can provide special privileges to the paid members of your forum by using user group permissions. For example, you can allow only paid users to upload photo albums, post attachments, or profile pictures. You can require that posts by normal users be approved before being displayed on the forum and allow posts from paid users to bypass approval.
Enabling Paid Access
First, ensure that Paid Access is enabled on your forum. You can enable Paid Access by following the directions below.
- Log in to your Website Toolbox account.
- Click the Settings link.
- Click the Paid Access link.
- Enable a payment provider if one is not enabled already: PayPal (Configuring your PayPal account for Paid Access) or Stripe (Connect Stripe as a payment processor). Users can pay with a credit or debit card through either provider.
- Enable the Donation option if you wish to accept the payments as donations.
Or,
Provide the Cost. - Save the changes.
Applying paid access restrictions
Once you enable Paid Access, a user group is created for each pricing plan in the Users section. Users who pay for a plan automatically receive that plan's user group as their additional user group. That gives them all the permissions of their primary user group (probably General) plus the permissions of the plan's user group. To restrict a feature to paid users only, restrict permissions for the General user group and give permissions to the plan's user group.
If you restrict access to your entire forum or specific categories using the options available in the Settings -> Paid Access section, the paid access payment page will automatically be displayed when a user tries to access those areas. If you have not restricted access to any areas and have only restricted access to features, you will need to post an announcement with the link where users can purchase a paid access premium subscription. The link address is https://FORUM_DOMAIN/?action=paid_access (Replace text "FORUM_ADDRESS" with the URL of your forum.)
Related Articles: