Restrict a Forum in Confluence to Outside Users Via Link

[IDOE]

In part of a Confluence space, I'm looking to design a forum with a specific setup in mind. Yes, I'm aware there are several forum apps for Confluence out there that can be hosted on any page, but I specifically need to have a forum where users would only be able to join the Forum with a specific link. (either a join link to the forum app, or a join link to that page)

With that latter in mind, I saw that Confluence is currently exploring a public link option (https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/share-content-externally-with-public-links/), which could be an answer, but I'm wondering if the barrier I'm running into is that setting space/page permissions on Confluence can only be done if you can insert the emails of Confluence users. The problem is here is that the forum users would not have Confluence accounts.

Any advice you could offer would be appreciated.

--Nate

[Blue Ridge Consultants]

The closest I can think of doing this would be to use the guest external collaboration feature.  Its currently in beta and more details can be found here:

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/invite-guests-for-external-collaboration/

Maybe the above feature plus the share content with links can get you most of the way there?

The biggest issue I see with this is you would need to manually invite the guests and give them access to the space so that would probably be a deal breaker.

Interesting use case, I'd like to see if anyone has implemented your exact use case in cloud.