From within your dashboard, you can control how people sign up for your community, what information they provide during sign-up, and how they complete their member profile.

Sign-up access settings, such as who can create an account and which email addresses can sign up, are managed under Settings → Sign-Up Settings.

To customize the information members provide when creating an account, navigate to Members → Sign-up & Onboarding Forms. From here, you can preview and customize both your Sign-up Form and Onboarding Form.

Members who are invited or added through the dashboard are not required to complete additional Sign-up Form questions when they are added. If required information is still missing, they will be asked to complete it when they claim their account and sign in for the first time.

Changes to your community sign-up settings are logged in the admin audit log you can track updates made by your team.

This is where you configure the settings for how a member would sign up for the community for the first time.

Your Sign-up Form is still used with SSO. After a member returns from your SSO provider, Gradual checks whether any required Sign-up Form information is missing.

If information is missing, the member will see a Complete Sign-Up page before continuing into the community. Information managed by your SSO provider cannot be edited from this page.

If all required Sign-up Form information has already been provided and the required terms have been accepted, the member can continue directly into the community.

If you’d like to remove, add, or reorder the available sign-in methods for your community, Gradual can configure their display order and presentation on your behalf.

With this setting, users can visit your community, sign up, and create an account themselves, without any barrier.

With this setting, users can visit your community, sign up, and create an account themselves unless their domain is blocked. If you have competitors or domains that you want to block sign-ups from, you can add a blocklist domains list to your Open community from the Sign-Up Settings page in the dashboard.

Toggle the Block Specific Email Domains option on from the Sign-Up Options section.

Add each email domain to the list that matches how you want people from that domain to be handled:

Each section displays the number of domains it contains, and you can add or edit domains for each handling option independently.

With this setting, users can visit your community but only sign up and create an account if they are using an email address from an approved email domain.

As the admin, you can add or manage all domains on the allowlist in the dashboard from Settings → Sign-Up Settings → Sign-Up Options. You must also decide how to handle users signing up with email addresses from non-approved domains:

With this setting, users can visit your community and apply to join through a native application form built directly in Gradual. Admins can customize the application form in the dashboard and review, accept, or decline applications from within Gradual.

As the admin, you can manage this from the dashboard in Settings → Sign-Up Settings by selecting Via Native Application Form.
​

From there, you can edit the application form and review submissions in Members → Application Forms and Members → Application Requests.

The application form also displays the profile questions from your current Sign-up Form, so you can review the information applicants will provide during account setup alongside your application questions.

When an application is submitted, the application request includes the applicant information collected through the application process along with their application responses. This gives admins additional information about the applicant when reviewing their request.

Applicants can only submit one application every 30 days using the same email address. If they try to apply again within that 30 day period, they will see that their application is still pending.

Once an application is accepted, the user will receive an approval email and can then sign in using that same email address. During account setup, they will be asked to complete any required information from your Sign-up Form that has not already been provided. After completing sign-up, they will automatically return to the page where they originally submitted their application, allowing them to continue what they came to do.

Admins can review submitted applications in the dashboard, including the page where each application was submitted from, then accept applicants as standard members, limited approval members, or guests, or decline the application.

With this setting, users can visit your community but must sign up via an external form or application. You must provide the URL where the form or application is hosted, and track the applications through the external URL form or service. These applicants will not populate on the Gradual member list, but you can manually invite them to the community through this process.

With this setting, users can visit your community but cannot sign up or create an account themselves. You, as the administrator must manually invite them to the community through this process.

The Sign-up Form controls the profile information members provide when creating an account for your community.

From the admin dashboard, navigate to Members → Sign-up & Onboarding Forms. This page includes separate tabs for your Sign-up Form and Onboarding Form, allowing you to preview each form before making changes.

Select Edit from the Sign-up Form tab to customize the form.

Standard profile fields appear at the top of the Sign-up Form in a fixed order.

First Name & Last Name and Title & Company are required for sign-up and cannot be removed or reordered.

You can also include the following standard profile fields:

These additional fields can be included as required or optional questions, or removed from the Sign-up Form.

You can add custom questions to the Sign-up Form using properties that have already been created under Members → Member Properties.

Select Add Question and choose from the available Member Properties. Properties that are already included in the Sign-up Form will not appear as available options. Private properties are identified when selecting questions so you can confirm what type of member information you are collecting.

After adding a custom question, you can reorder it within the custom question section, make it required or optional, or remove it from the Sign-up Form.

When managing your Sign-up Form, you can see whether a Member Property is also being used in your Onboarding Form and Member Profile Fields.

If a question is collected during sign-up but is not included in Member Profile Fields, members will not be able to update that information from their profile after joining the community.

To control which information members can view and manage from their profile, navigate to Members → Member Profile Fields.

After making changes to the Sign-up Form, select Save to review your updates before they are applied.

The review shows the differences between the current and updated form, including questions that have been added or removed. Review the changes, then confirm to update the Sign-up Form.

Your Sign-up Form is used across the primary account creation experiences in your community, including standard sign-up and account claiming.

It is also used when a visitor completes guest checkout for an event. Profile Picture is always shown during guest checkout. If Profile Picture is not included in your standard Sign-up Form, it will appear as an optional field during guest checkout.

For communities using SSO, Gradual checks the Sign-up Form after the member returns from the SSO provider. If required information is missing, the member will complete it on the Complete Sign-Up page before continuing.

Members who are invited or imported through the dashboard are not required to provide every required Sign-up Form field when they are added. If required information is still missing, they will be asked to provide it when they claim their account.

These settings control additional behaviors during sign-up, including work email requirements and the automatic welcome email.

This is an option if you would like to suggest users use a work email when signing up, but do not require it. This will populate a prompt in the email address field that reads "Enter your work email address" to encourage users to use their work email when signing up.

The system will accept all email domains with this setting enabled.

This is an option if you would like to require a work email when signing up. This will populate a prompt in the email address field that reads "Enter your work email address" and will not accept free email domains unless specified exceptions are added.

You may add up to ten free email domain exceptions by selecting from the full list. The system will accept only sign-ups from the free email domains that are on this exceptions list.

You can enable or disable the automatic welcome email from the community that is customized with your logo, and community name. If enabled, this email will be sent automatically within minutes of the user signing up for the community, and work to introduce them to your community and confirm their sign-up.

Some customers prefer to disable this email and send one of their own as the text cannot be customized or changed beyond using your community name and logo.

You can show a consent checkbox on the sign-up form so members can opt in to marketing email. This is set up under Settings → Community → Legal & Policy Settings — see Community Code of Conduct and Privacy Policy.

If your sign-up flow routes some users to a Pending Approval or Unapproved state, you can customize the page messaging they see from the dashboard.

Navigate to Customization → Page Messages to manage these messages. This area includes separate sections for:

For Pending Approval and Unapproved, there are separate message settings for:

Each version includes:

For Application Gate, if your community uses Via Native Application Form, Via External Sign-Up or Application, or requires visitors from non-approved email domains to complete the community application form, there are also separate message settings for:

Each version includes:

Admins can preview the member-facing page before publishing changes, and the preview follows the community’s light or dark theme settings. You can edit the copy, save changes, and use Reset to default at any time to restore the default messaging.

For Application Gate, admins cannot customize the lock icon, the Back to sign in button label or behavior, or the Apply to join button label.

When a user lands on one of these pages, they will see the message that matches their current sign-up state.

If your community has re-signup rules in place for unapproved users, the Unapproved page will continue to display when re-signup is blocked permanently or when the user tries to sign up again before any cooldown period has ended.

When a user lands on this page, they will see the message that matches their current status.

These settings control where members can edit their basic account information after signing up.

To control which additional profile fields members can view and manage from their profile, navigate to Members → Member Profile Fields.

This is an option if you'd like members to be able to edit their initial profile information within Gradual.

This is an option if you'd like members to only edit their initial profile information in an external form. You must provide the URL where the form or application is hosted, and track the changes through the external URL form or service. Any changes requested by users to their profile will need to be made by the administrator.

This is an option if you'd like to restrict members from editing their first name, last name, company, or job title after sign-up is complete.

Standard member properties are managed under Members → Member Properties.

From the standard properties section, you can update the display names for supported fields, including Title & Company and Bio. The updated names are used wherever those properties appear for members.