Reader sign-in

Reader sign-in lets the people who read your spaces — your customers, your community, your employees — create an account and sign in. Once signed in, a reader can do everything you've opened up to members: read private or gated content, post in your forum, vote on your roadmap, react, and get notified.

This is different from team sign-in. Your team (staff, editors, admins) sign in to the Forumulate console to build and manage your site. Readers sign in on the public side of your spaces. This guide is about readers.

The one big idea: bring your own, never locked in

You are never forced to use a single login provider. You choose which sign-in methods your readers can use, and every one is bring-your-own — you plug in your own Google app, your own company SSO, or even your own identity platform. Readers sign in against your system, and their accounts stay tied to your business.

You can offer as many methods as you like at once. A reader just sees a row of buttons — "Continue with Google", "Continue with Microsoft", an email-and-password form — and picks one.

Where to find it

In the console, open an organization and go to Sign-in & auth. The Reader sign-in panel is where you:

• pick where reader accounts live (in your own provider, or hosted here and synced to you),

• add and configure sign-in methods,

• optionally require approval before a new reader becomes a member.

Settings are per-organization by default, and a single space can override them if it needs a different set of methods.

What a reader experiences

When a reader hits content that requires signing in, they see a clean sign-in card with one button per method you enabled, plus a password form if you offer email-and-password. They choose a method, authenticate against your provider, and land back on your page — now signed in as a real member.

If you host reader accounts on Forumulate, they can also sign up on the spot. If accounts live in your own system, they're sent to your system to sign in and come back federated.

The rest of this guide

• Reader sign-in methods — the full catalog of everything you can turn on, and what each one needs.

• Set up a sign-in method — step by step, including where to get the credentials for the popular providers, per-space overrides, and the approval toggle.

• Reader sign-in on your own domain — make sign-in first-party on a customer's custom domain.

• Sync readers into your own directory — when accounts are hosted here, push every reader into your own user database.

A note on security

Every secret you enter — client secrets, SSO signing material, directory tokens — is write-only. You can save it and replace it, but it's never shown back to you or to any reader, and it never appears in the public data your sign-in page reads. Publishable values (client IDs, issuer URLs) are the only things that reach the browser, which is exactly how they're meant to be used.