Membership settings

Two decisions that shape your whole membership: how open your community is, and how long a member keeps access when their card fails.

Most of your membership is content and pricing. This page is the two rules underneath it. Both are small switches with large consequences, so it is worth understanding each before you change it.

Go to Membership then Settings in your dashboard.
Change what you need.
Click Save changes.

The save button stays greyed out until you have actually changed something, so you can look without worrying.

Require an active membership to interact

The toggle is labelled Members-only interaction.

When it is off (the default), your community is open. Anyone signed in can post, reply, react, comment, and chat.

When it is on, only people with an active membership can interact anywhere in the member area: your community spaces, comments, reactions, and chat. New spaces you create also default to being gated.

Reading stays open either way. This gates taking part, not looking. Someone who has not joined can still see the conversation and decide it is worth paying for, which is usually what converts them.

Which way round should this be?

If your problem is that nobody is posting, leave it off and let everyone in. If your problem is noise, spam, or paying members feeling crowded out, turn it on and make membership the price of a voice.

Turning it on does not remove anyone or delete anything. It changes who can write from that moment on. Turning it back off opens participation up again immediately.

If you only need to silence one person rather than everyone, mute them instead. See moderation.

Grace period after a failed payment

The field is Days of access after a failed payment, and it accepts anything from 0 to 90 days. It starts at 14.

When a member's card fails, they keep full access while the payment is retried. This number is how long that lasts. When it runs out, the membership expires and access is cut automatically, with no further warning from you.

The page tells you in plain words what your current number means, for example: "A member whose card fails keeps access for 14 days, then the membership expires."

Setting it to 0 cuts access instantly

Zero is a real setting, and the page says so: "Access is cut as soon as a charge fails. There is no window to recover the card." That is rarely what you want. Cutting someone off the moment a bank declines a routine renewal is one of the leading causes of cancellation, and most declines fix themselves on the second attempt.

Changing this number only affects failures from here on. Members already inside a grace window keep the window they were given.

Finding the members in that window

Go to Membership then Members and switch to the Payment issues tab. Everyone whose card has failed and who still has access is there, with the date their access ends. Those are the people worth an email while there is still something to save. See members.

Their status badge reads Payment failed or Grace period, and the row spells out the deadline. Nothing more is asked of you: if the payment goes through before the deadline, the member carries on and you never hear about it. If it does not, access is cut on the day, automatically.

Both settings apply to your whole workspace

There is no per-tier version of either. One participation rule and one grace period cover every tier you run, which is deliberate: a member on your cheapest tier and a member on your VIP tier should not discover different rules about whether their card failing costs them access.

What these settings do not control

A few things people look for here and will not find:

Who can see what. That is set per post, per collection, and per space, using membership tiers. See posts and community spaces.
Making a tier a requirement to buy something. That lives under Settings then the Features tab and is explained in members-only access.
Silencing one person. That is a mute, on their member page. See moderation.
Prices and currency. Prices are on each tier, and the currency for the whole workspace is under Settings then the Payment tab. See membership tiers and payment setup.

Where to go next

Chase the failing cards on the members page.
Set who can post where with community spaces.
Handle the individual cases in moderation.
Looking for the setting that makes members-only restrictions bite? That one lives in Settings then Features, and is explained in members-only access.