Who can see a board, and who can write to it

Two separate questions, and they are two separate switches on a board's Settings → Access tab.

• Who can see it — public, or private.
• Who can write to it — anyone, or only people who have said who they are.

Public or private

Public means anybody with the link can read the board, its roadmap and its changelog. Search engines can too. This is what you want for the board you link from your product.

Private means only people you admit can read it at all. Everyone else gets a gate. Use it for a beta group, a named customer, or an internal board.

Private boards need a paid plan.

Admitting people to a private board

The people admitted to a private board are its Members. That is a different thing from a seat on your team — a Member can read and write on that board and has no access to your workspace.

Two ways in, and they work together:

• Invite them, one address at a time or by allowing a whole email domain, so anybody at @theircompany.com is in.
• Let your own app vouch for them, if you use single sign-on. Turn on SSO admits and anybody your product signs in can read the board.

You can have both: SSO configured for most boards, and one board kept to a named few.

The gate never says whether an address was invited. Whatever somebody types, it says the same thing — otherwise the gate would confirm who your customers are to anybody who guessed.

Who can write

Let anyone post and vote decides whether writing needs an identity.

On — somebody can vote, post and comment without proving anything. The simplest possible path, and the reason people actually leave feedback.

Off — they are asked who they are first, before the form rather than after it. A vote does not paint and then roll back, and a comment is never accepted onto a sheet that then asks for a sign-in.

The switch is off for new boards. You can turn it on per board, and it is unlimited on every plan — we do not charge per voter, now or ever.

Private boards are always identified, because a board that authorises its audience cannot have an anonymous half.

How somebody proves who they are

Whatever you have turned on under Install:

• A six-digit code to their email address. Always available.
• Your own sign-in, if you use single sign-on — they are already identified and never see a sheet.
• Your OIDC provider, if you configured one.

If you turn everything off, the code still works. A board nobody can write to, with nothing on screen saying why, is worse than an option you forgot to keep.

What happens to what they were doing

Somebody part-way through a comment when they are asked to sign in has that comment posted once they are in. A vote or a reaction is not replayed — the count in front of them is the answer, and repeating it would move it twice.

Anything they did anonymously in that browser becomes theirs when they sign in, so their earlier votes still read as voted.

Reading is never gated by the write switch

Turning writing off does not hide anything. The board, its posts, its roadmap and its changelog read exactly as before. Only writing asks.