Limit Chat Availabilty to Paid Members
under review
Tue Olesen
When enabled on a membership site, the Chat feature currenly allows messaging to ALL contacts that are members on the membership site (see this list under Site settings -> Members in the simplero backend)
In order to make the Chat feature useful, i'd like to limit the list of people that can be access the chat feature, and be added as chat participants, to a selected set of users: Those who are paid members on my membership sites.
Many membership site members are guests and former customers. They still have a user profile on the membership site, but they are not active. The actual people i interact with are given access to specific content and groups on the membership site, via purchases and automations.
For privacy reasons, i therefore suggest a setup where the chat availability can be limited as follows:
- Enable limiting the chat feature to be available for at selected group of contacts (e.g. "Customer must have have tag "this-or-that" or have purchased product X, or be subscribed to list Y, to gain Chat access.
- Limit the chat contact list to be only for this limited group of contacts, instead of the entire membership members list.
I really hope this can be solved - it matters so much for privacy and community connectedness, that paid members can rely on that whoever they start writing messages to, are actually also paying members.
PS. There is currently NO smart way to clean out the membership site Members list to be only those with granted access, so that route is not viable.
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Angel Orozco
under review
Thank you for the request! This sounds important and we'll review it. I'll update the thread with the decision.
Tue Olesen
Angel Orozco: Sounds good - thank you!
Tue Olesen
Related feature request here about features to enable moderation and control over chat threads: https://requests.simplero.com/feature-requests/p/member-to-member-chat-moderation-reporting-locking
Sarah Belzile
Yes please! I agree that this flow and format for chatting makes a lot of sense!
Ryan Henderson
Wait - are you saying that people who used to be, but are no longer members of a membership site, would also get chat notifications? If so, then this is an extremely important fix!
Tue Olesen
Ryan Henderson: No that's not what i intended to say :-) Notifications are only sent to the contacts that participate in a chat, so that part is OK.
The thing is - when enabling "member to member chat", everyone who is listed in the membership site settings under "Members" -> With Access, are able to chat to each other, and currently there's no way to limit that to a subset of the contacts (e.g. paid members, list members, tagged members).
Ryan Henderson
Tue Olesen: Ok. Thanks for the clarification. Makes sense to me.
Merete Stenner
Yes please, in my opinion the chat function is useless until this is solved. I think it would be logical if the chat functionality would follow the group setting on a site. So we can make a chat only for members of a group, without having to add each member to the chat. Alternative options could be add participants on a product or subscribers to a list, or a specific tag.
My best guess is, that most Simplero users don't want to allow member to member chat directly, but will instead setup specific chat groups for each class or course. And if you have hundreds of members on a site, selecting the specific ones that should have access to a specific chat by adding them person by person is just hopeless. Also access to the chat should be closed if they leave the product or whatever else, that gave access. And on top of that it should be possible to remove a specific person even though their access to the chat is given through a product or similar.
Tue Olesen
Merete Stenner: I agree, some sort of admin moderation and control over chat threads would be useful. This may put admins in a difficult position though: If some contacts started to chat about sensitive/private topics without the admin knowing - when and how is an admin allowed to read/moderate/delete that chat? And when should the participants be notified if an admin is monitoring/moderating the chat?
Merete Stenner
Tue Olesen: yep lots of privacy issue if personal chats are available within our domain of responsibility. Who's to blame if someone sends ilegal content to other members in private chats? Even if we can't monitor them.