Your community can carry a member cap, a limit on how many fully onboarded testers it holds. The cap keeps your community at the size your account is set up for, and the waiting list decides what happens to people who arrive once it is full: they can be turned away, or held until you have room and are ready to admit them.

This is what you use to grow a community deliberately rather than all at once. If you want to add members in controlled waves so you can vet them, hold every registration on the waiting list. If you would rather let people join freely until you run out of room and only then start queueing, hold registrations over the cap. Either way you keep the interested testers instead of losing them at a closed sign-up page.

The member cap and the community waiting list are granted per account. If you do not see a member count on the Tester Onboarding page, your community is not capped, and if the waiting list options described below are missing, that feature is not part of your account.

A member takes up one slot once they have completed every onboarding step your community requires. They created their account, verified their email address, accepted the current version of any agreements you require, and filled in the profile fields you collect.

Anyone still working through those steps takes up nothing. That includes testers you imported from a CSV but have not invited yet, testers who signed up but have not verified their email, and testers waiting to accept your terms. Testers held on your waiting list, removed members, and members who opted out never count.

Registration is the point where the cap is enforced, because a person registering is about to walk the onboarding funnel and claim a slot.

Once your onboarded member count reaches the cap, new self-registrations through your community landing page, invite codes, email allowlist, and single sign-on are turned away. Testers see the message "Registrations for this community are currently closed." If you use the Over cap setting described below, they are held on your waiting list instead.

Adding testers in bulk is not blocked by the cap, because none of those people occupy a slot on the day you add them. CSV imports of any size go through, so does enrolling testers by tag, adding an existing tester through the API, and accepting testers into a test. Each of them takes a slot only later, when they register and finish onboarding. Testers provisioned through directory sync are always added.

Off means people who register join your community and can start testing right away, as long as you are below your cap. Once the cap is reached, new registrations are turned away rather than held.

All registrations holds every new registration on the waiting list until you invite them, whatever your current size.

Over cap holds registrations only once your cap is reached. Below the cap, people register normally. This option only appears when your account includes both the waiting list and a member cap.

A second setting on the same page, Add to waitlist before registration & onboarding, decides how far a held tester gets before they are stopped. Turned on, they join the waiting list as soon as they enter their email address and complete registration and onboarding after you accept them. Left off, they create their account and finish onboarding first, and are held at the end. Both are holds, and How people get into your community covers both waiting list settings in full.

The Tester Onboarding page shows your cap usage as "X of Y onboarded members". When you are at or over the cap, a notice tells you the community is full so it is obvious why registrations closed.

Your community page shows three figures above the member grid. Members is everyone who has finished onboarding. Onboarding is everyone still working through the steps. Waitlist is everyone currently held. Click a figure to filter the grid down to those members, and click it again to clear the filter.

The figures follow whatever other filters you already have applied, so setting a testing status first narrows all three. Not every community shows all three: if yours does not have its own subdomain, the Onboarding figure is hidden and Members counts every active member instead, and Waitlist appears only when your account includes the waiting list.

Importing a CSV and registering are two different things. Importing adds people to your community directly, but they have no password and have never logged in. Registering is when that person creates their own account on your community's create-account page.

Your waiting list settings apply to registrations, not to imports. A normal import is never blocked by the cap and your registration settings are not applied to the people in the file. Those settings apply later, the first time an imported tester signs up, including when they sign up through a connected Google or single sign-on account. Signing in after that is just a login and the settings are not applied again.

To hold one specific batch regardless of your registration settings, click Import Testers, upload and map your CSV, turn on Send to the waiting list, and click Import. Every tester in that file is held until you invite them.

The import dialog also carries the options that give imported testers a way to reach your create-account page, such as adding their addresses to your allowed list and emailing them a sign-up link. Importing Testers into Your Community covers them in full. The one cap-related detail: an imported tester who will be held before registration and onboarding does not receive that onboarding email, because it would send them to a page they cannot complete yet.

Go to Your Community, open the Members tab, filter by the On Waitlist onboarding status or select the testers you want, and click Invite from waitlist. Released testers keep their place in your community permanently, and anyone who had not registered yet receives an email inviting them to create their account. Releasing people in batches or by name is covered in How people get into your community.

Your member count can read higher than your cap, for example "512 of 500". Testers already partway through onboarding when the cap filled are never turned away at the finish line, so they can push the count over. Nothing is removed automatically, and self-registration stays closed until the count drops back below the cap.

Once a member has been counted, they keep their slot. Publishing a new version of an agreement or starting to collect an extra profile field does not free up slots, even though those members show a pending status in the grid until they catch up.

Releasing testers from your waiting list is limited only by the people in your selection who have already finished onboarding. Anyone still mid-journey releases freely even when your community is full, and takes a slot later when they finish. If your selection contains more onboarded members than you have room for, the release is blocked and the message tells you how many you can release.

Reactivating a member you previously removed uses a slot only if that member had already completed onboarding. Reactivating someone who never finished is never blocked.

Existing members are never affected by the cap. It only controls new enrollments.

Being held on the waiting list is not undone automatically. If your community later drops below its cap, people already waiting stay there until you invite them.

Testers who are already fully onboarded members are never moved to the waiting list, and testers you have already invited from the waiting list are never sent back to it.

To change your cap, contact your account manager or support.