Champ › Guides › Users & permissions

Users & permissions

Forum members are your Shopify customers. There is no second account system, no separate password, and no sign-up form to maintain — which is most of the reason a forum on your own store works better than one on a subdomain.

How someone becomes a member#

When a signed-in Shopify customer visits your forum, Champ recognises them and creates a forum user record linked to that customer. They can post immediately. If they are not signed in, they see your store's normal login screen and come back afterwards.

You can also allow anonymous posting, where someone can write without an account. It lowers the barrier and raises the spam. If you turn it on, read the anti-spam guide first.

The opposite switch, Restrict access to forum pages to logged in users, requires a signed-in customer for everything, reading included. That turns the whole forum into a private members' area.

Tagging users#

Forum access is driven by Shopify customer tags. You apply them in the Shopify admin, on the customer record, exactly as you would for anything else.

In the Shopify admin, open Customers and select a customer.
Add a tag — wholesale, vip, cohort-3, whatever you need.
In Champ, open the forum you want to restrict and limit it to that tag.

From then on, only customers carrying that tag can see that forum. Remove the tag and access goes with it. Because it is the same tag system you use for discounts and segments, you are not maintaining a second list of who is allowed where.

Nicknames, profiles and avatars#

By default members appear under the name on their Shopify customer record. Several things are adjustable in Settings:

Nicknames — let members choose a display name instead of their real one.
Anonymised usernames — show an abbreviated form rather than a full name.
Profile descriptions — a short bio on the member's profile page.
Signatures — a block appended to each of their posts.
Profile view counts — show how many times a profile has been viewed.
Reveal email publicly — off by default, and there is rarely a good reason to change it.

Avatars come from one of three sources, set in Settings: generated letter avatars, Gravatar, or images members upload themselves. Uploaded avatars need Cloudinary connected.

Adding moderators#

Find the member in Users in the dashboard and promote them to moderator.

Moderators get their powers on the storefront itself — they see approve, edit, hide, lock, move and delete controls while reading the forum normally. They never need access to your Shopify admin, which makes it safe to appoint a trusted customer rather than only staff.

What they can do is covered in the moderation guide.

Viewing and managing members#

The Users section lists everyone with their post counts, points and join date, and lets you search. From a member's record you can promote them, review what they have written, or ban them.

Banning#

Banning stops a member posting. Their existing posts stay unless you remove them separately, which is usually what you want — deleting a banned member's entire history also deletes half of several conversations other people were having.

For a flood of new accounts rather than one bad actor, banning individually is the wrong tool. See anti-spam.