Locking down your tender: privacy and closed sites

Tender is intended to be a hybrid forum/support software. However, not every site wants or needs a public forum.

There are a few ways you can lock down your tender install;

Private categories

This is the recommended option. Set some categories (i.e. Billing) to private, and discussions cannot be seen by other users. Support staff can make some discussions public (i.e. a supporter announcement) which can help users reporting issues.

Private sites

Note: Private Sites is not available on all Tender plans. If you do not see this option on your dashboard, you will need to upgrade to a higher plan to enable Private Mode.

You can easily stop new or anonymous users from even creating an account on your site. Once this is enabled, users can only view your Tender by already having an account, by being invited, or logging in through SSO, which creates accounts automatically.

Once users DO have an account, they will be able to view the support forum as before.

Disable Forum

You can also disable the forum on your Tender. This means that users will see their own discussions only, and won't have access to the forum-style categories list; nor can they see any other users' discussions.

You can use privacy and disable forum at the same time - so that no new users can sign up, and when they do, can only see their own content.

If you want to keep your discussions public, but you don't need users to comment on each other's discussions, you can select Support Only to limit replies to staff and users already on the discussion.