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      Allow restricted-access users to participate in Social Squared forums

      This article provides some ideas for the scenario where you do not wish to give forum participants Site Member permissions.

      The Social Squared discussion forum platform for SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams uses SharePoint's built-in permissions to determine a person's access to the forums. A person who is a Site or Team Owner will automatically be a Social Squared Administrator - that is, they can create the forum structure, as well as perform administrative tasks within the forums. Anyone who is a Site or Team Member will automatically be able to participate in the Social Squared forums - that is, they can create new Topics, reply to Posts, and give feedback.

      People who have read-only access to the site on which Social Squared has been added, will not be able to participate in, or even view, the forum content. This is because the Social Squared Online content is stored in SharePoint lists on that site, and even viewing the content requires fields in the lists to be updated, which requires at least SharePoint Contribute permission.

      Social Squared is designed for collaboration, assuming that the forum participants are collaborators (members) of the SharePoint site or Teams team. However, there may be a scenario where you wish to allow people to participate in the forums without giving them the ability to edit other things on that site. This article outlines several options to achieve this, depending on your specific needs.

      Option A:

      1. Create a custom SharePoint permission level called something like Forum Contribute, which would be a copy of the built-in Contribute permission level, minus things like creating sites, etc. (Note that Delete items must still be included.)
      2. Create a new SharePoint Group called something like Forum Members, add your users (or a group containing those users) to this group, and grant the group your new Forum Contribute permission level.
      3. To remove the ability of these users to edit pages, you can break permission inheritance on the Pages library, and give this group only Read access to that library.
      4. The above steps will allow the users to add and update list items, which they must be able to do to use Social Squared. However, if you have a number of other lists and libraries on this site that you don’t want these users to be able to create and edit items in, then you would need to use Option B.

      Option B:

      • Leave the users in a Read-only group (e.g. Visitors) they may currently be in for this site, break permission inheritance on each of the Social Squared lists one by one, and grant these users (or the group they’re in) Contribute permissions on each list. Note that if there are future updates to Social Squared that add more lists, you will need to do this again for those new lists.

      Option C:

      • Create a site that contains only the forum, and just remove the member users’ permission to edit pages, as in the 3rd point of Option A above.