Champ › Guides › Members & access

Members & access

Your forum members are your Shopify customers. They do not need a second account or password, and you do not need a sign-up form. You manage who can do what with the Shopify customer tags you already use.

How a customer becomes a forum member#

  1. A customer signs in to your store.
  2. They open the forum.
  3. Champ creates a forum member for them, linked to their Shopify customer record.

They can post right away. A visitor who is not signed in sees your store's normal login page first, then comes back to the forum.

This is why the Users list in the Champ dashboard can be shorter than your Shopify customer list. A customer only appears there after they have visited the forum while signed in.

Letting people post without signing in#

You can let visitors post without an account. This is called anonymous posting.

  1. In the Champ dashboard, open Forums and open the forum.
  2. Under Who can view and post, choose Anyone can view and post.
  3. Click Save.

Anonymous posting makes it easier to join in. It also brings much more spam. Read the anti-spam guide before you turn it on.

Making the whole forum members-only#

You can hide the whole forum from anyone who is not signed in, including reading.

  1. In the Champ dashboard, open Settings.
  2. In the Forum path section, tick Restrict access to forum pages to logged in users.
  3. Click Save.

Limiting a forum to tagged customers#

You can limit a forum to customers with a certain Shopify tag, such as wholesale or vip.

  1. In your Shopify admin, open Customers and choose a customer.
  2. Add a tag, for example vip, and save.
  3. In the Champ dashboard, open Forums and open the forum you want to limit.
  4. Under Who can view and post, choose an option that mentions a tag. For example: Registered users with tag can view and post.
  5. In Customer tags, type the tag. To allow several tags, separate them with commas.
  6. Click Save.

Now only signed-in customers with one of those tags get access. Remove the tag in Shopify, and their access goes too. You do not keep a second list of who is allowed where.

Names, profiles and avatars#

By default, a member shows up under the name on their Shopify customer record. Members can choose a nickname on their own profile page.

You control the rest in the Champ dashboard. Open Settings and go to the User profiles section:

  • Enable user signatures — a short text shown after each of the member's posts.
  • Enable user descriptions — a short bio on the member's profile page.
  • Display profile view counts — shows how many times a profile was viewed.
  • Make email addresses publicly viewable in user profiles — off by default. Leave it off. If your forum is not password protected, anyone (including Google) can read every member's email address.
  • Avatar generator — the picture for members with no photo: Gravatar or Letters. You can also upload your own Default avatar.

In the Privacy section, Anonymize usernames replaces every member's name with a made-up one, such as User332.

Members can also upload their own photo as their avatar, from their profile page.

Making someone a moderator#

A moderator can keep the forum tidy for you: edit, hide, lock, move and delete posts and topics.

  1. In your Shopify admin, open Customers and choose the customer.
  2. Add the tag champ-moderator and save.
  3. The customer signs in to your store and opens the forum. They now see extra moderator buttons.

Moderators work on the forum itself, on your store. They never need access to your Shopify admin. So you can safely make a trusted customer a moderator, not only your staff.

By default, a moderator can moderate every forum. To limit one forum to certain moderators:

  1. In the Champ dashboard, open Forums and open the forum.
  2. In Moderator tag, type a tag, for example moderator-customer-support.
  3. Click Save.

Now only customers with that tag can moderate that forum. Customers tagged champ-admin can always moderate every forum.

What moderators can do is in the moderation guide.

Finding a member#

In the Champ dashboard, open Users. You see each member's name, Shopify ID, @mention name, email, number of posts, points, and when they were last online.

To find someone, type a name, email, Champ user ID or Shopify customer ID in Search users, then click Search. Click a member's points number to change their points.

Banning a member#

To ban a member, add the tag champ-banned to them in your Shopify admin.

When they are signed in, they can no longer see the forum. They see "You have been banned" and are sent back to your store's home page.

Their old posts stay. That is usually what you want. Deleting all their posts would also break conversations other people were having.

If many new accounts are posting spam, banning them one by one will not help. See the anti-spam guide.

Users online#

The forum's sidebar shows a Users Online list of who is reading right now. It makes a quiet forum feel lived-in.

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