Access Control

The Access Control setting decides whether your community is open to the public or hidden behind sign-in. Pick the right mode in one place and Jetonomy enforces it across every page and the REST API.

What You Will Learn

• The difference between Public and Private community modes
• Why sign-in, register, and lost password stay reachable in Private mode
• How REST API access changes between the two modes
• When to switch and what to expect

Go to Jetonomy → Settings → General and find the Access Control card. Under Community Access, choose Public community or Private community. It is one card on the General tab, not a separate sub-page - the same guest_read toggle introduced under Guest Access on the General Settings page.

Public Mode (default)

This is the Public community option: “Anyone can read topics and replies. Visitors must log in to post, reply, or vote.”

Anyone - including search engines and visitors who haven’t signed in - can read posts, replies, and member profiles. Posting and voting still require sign-in.

This is the default for every community and is unchanged from prior versions. Existing communities continue working without any setting change after upgrading to 1.4.1.

Use Public mode when:

• You want search engine traffic to find your community
• You’re running a customer support forum or open knowledge base
• New visitors should be able to browse before signing up

Private spaces for visitors

Setting: guest_private_teasers - Show private spaces to logged-out visitors, default off.

When on, private spaces appear in listings for visitors who are not signed in, with a lock and their join policy, so they know the group exists and can log in or register to ask to join. Their topics, replies and counts behind the gate stay hidden. Hidden spaces are never shown. Leave it off if the names of your private spaces should stay private.

Private Mode

This is the Private community option: “Only logged-in members can view any forum content. Everyone else is redirected to the login page.”

Every community page requires sign-in. Guests visiting /community/ or any space, post, tag, or profile URL are redirected to the WordPress login page. The REST API also rejects unauthenticated requests for community data.

Jetonomy has no sign-in, register, or lost-password pages of its own. Those are WordPress’s own pages, which sit outside your community, so Private mode never blocks them. Whether guests can create an account depends on the Anyone can register setting under Settings → General in WordPress.

Use Private mode when:

• The community is for paying members only
• Discussions are confidential (internal team, private group, paid coaching)
• You don’t want search engines to index any community content

What Stays Public in Private Mode

The WordPress sign-in, registration, and forgot-password pages are not part of the community, so guests can always reach them to sign up and recover access.

Everything else - homepage, spaces, posts, replies, tags, member profiles, leaderboard, search - is gated.

REST API Behaviour

Public mode: read endpoints return data to anyone. Write endpoints still require auth.

Private mode: every endpoint under /wp-json/jetonomy/v1/ requires an authenticated request. Anonymous calls return 401 Unauthorized. This is checked centrally - third-party clients calling the API see the same gate as the website does.

Switching Modes

Switching is instant and applies to the next page load. You can change the mode at any time:

• Public → Private: existing public links become sign-in redirects. Search engines will eventually drop your indexed pages.
• Private → Public: pages become reachable again. Submit your sitemap to search engines if you want re-indexing.

There’s no migration step and no downtime.