How to See Your Community as a Visitor in BuddyNext

How to see your BuddyNext community as a visitor, step by step. Someone who is not signed in lands on Explore and can read public posts, browse the member and space directories, open a profile, a shared post or an open space. A Join the community card invites them to sign up or log in, and logging in returns them to the page they were on. Notifications, Messages and Settings need an account. To close the whole community to visitors, switch on Require login to view the community under BuddyNext, then Members, then Privacy & Data.

Transcript

In this tutorial you will see your community as a visitor in BuddyNext. A visitor is anyone who is not signed in. Most people meet your community this way first. You need BuddyNext, the free plugin. There is nothing to switch on. It takes about three minutes. There are six steps. Open the community signed out. Browse members and spaces. Open a shared post. Open a space. See what needs an account. Then close the community to visitors. Step one. Open the community signed out. Sign out, or use a private window, and open your community. A visitor lands on Explore, the page of public activity. Under the heading is a card, Join the community, with two buttons. Sign up free, and Log in. Below it, a visitor can read on. Only public posts, and posts in open spaces, are shown to them. Step two. Browse members and spaces. The member directory is open to a visitor, with the same card and its own invitation. Each member has a View profile button. It opens the profile itself, not the login page. On a profile, a button such as Follow takes the visitor to log in first. The space directory works the same way. A visitor can look through the spaces listed there. Step three. Open a shared post. A link to a public post is often the first page a visitor sees. They can read the post, its reactions and its comments. Under the post is the same card. From here, Log in brings the visitor back to this post once they have signed in. Step four. Open a space. This space is open, so a visitor can read its feed. Where a member would see Join, the button reads Log in to join. Above the posts, a card named Join to participate tells them to sign in to post, react and reply. Step five. See what needs an account. Some pages are personal. Notifications, Messages and Settings send a visitor to the login page. After they sign in, they are taken to the page they asked for. A new visitor can use Create an account instead. Step six. Close the community to visitors. In your WordPress admin, open BuddyNext, then Members, then Privacy and Data. The first switch is Require login to view the community. It is off by default. Switch it on, and every community page sends a visitor to the login page. Signing in, signing up and resetting a password stay open. That is all six. The community opened signed out, members and spaces browsed, a shared post and a space opened, the pages that need an account seen, and the switch that closes the doors found. You now know what your community shows before anyone joins. Next in this series: Send a direct message.