Enabling secure access to the Champ forum

Hi there,
I've installed the Champ app on a trial basis and made a few customizations:

1) Why is the admin password displayed in clear text?

2) When trying to login as admin below, nothing happens - what am I doing wrong?
https://netradigital.com/community/champ

3) How do I ensure that users who subscribe using a Shopify product page are able to
access the Champ chat forum? Is there a post login URL redirect setting?

4) What's the maximum number of user accounts allowed for the Champ forum?

Hi there,

This is Simon, the developer for Champ. I've emailed you about your questions at d**@n***.com (the same email account that's associated with your Shopify store).

I've copied and pasted my response here in case you browse back to the forum here first:

Please see the answers to your questions below:

1) Why is the admin password displayed in clear text?

Are you looking to lock out permission for the forum?

There are a few ways, some more secure than others. Let me know what you're trying to do and I'll be able to give you a few suggestions. In general, the best way to lock out access is to only enable it to registered users.

This can be done on a per-forum level or at site-level.

2) When trying to login as admin below, nothing happens - what am I doing wrong?

https://netradigital.com/community/champ

I looked at your installation. It looks like you had modified the path of the app to /app/forums, but some additional steps weren't completed.

Shopify controls all the paths of where the app can be served from. As a result, changing it to /app/forums in the app alone will not be enough. There's an extra setting that is on the app page that needs to be updated as well.

Here are the full set of instructions to do that: https://getchamp.net/guides/customizations/#custom-forum-path

For now, I've reverted the settings back to /community/champ (the default setting), so things should work.

3) How do I ensure that users who subscribe using a Shopify product page are able to access the Champ chat forum? Is there a post login URL redirect setting?

The way users work in Champ is that it is integrated with your existing Shopify user database. The app itself doesn't have its own user database (ie. Champ does not have a login page). It uses your store's existing login page.

Here's an explanation of how users work in the forum: https://getchamp.net/guides/users/#about-users

You provide access by specifying permissions to specific forums (https://getchamp.net/guides/forums/#setting-permissions) or to the entire site (https://getchamp.net/guides/forums/#other-ways-to-restrict-access).

From your question, it looks like you might be trying to have a forum site on your product page? The app does not work this way -- do let me know what you're looking to do (eg. the workflow) and I'll be able to let you know if Champ is the right choice here.

4) What's the maximum number of user accounts allowed for the Champ forum?

There is no maximum users. Our largest merchant has about several hundred thousand users.

Hi There!

I have a piggy back question on #3. =)

I am planning on having users pay a subscription fee to gain access to this forum. That said, I could have them pay through Shopify - and I was assuming my only way to manage this would to then tag them with access manually once they set up a subscription?

Obviously, this is a lot of manual labor, but I don't anticipate more than 100 users for now, so it should be manageable.

Are there better ways you've seen to execute this sort of thing?

Thanks!

Hi there,

I think what can be done is you can implement an auto tagging thing. I think there are some apps to handle this where when a customer orders specific product (through Shopify) to tag a user with a specific tag.

Related to this, I received word that Shopify is implementing a subscription API some time in early 2021. If this is true, I will likely add a feature to Champ where merchants can sell subscription access to the forum. And so with this set up, your customers can order through the usual Shopify check out and Champ will automatically recognize that and enable access. Again, this is still in development on Shopify's side, so I'll know when they release the API officially.