Everything about your community that is not a post or a person lives here, across eight tabs: Information, Design, Profiles, Interactions, Gamification, Updates, Chat system and Post rules.
Information
The Community Name and a Description of up to 255 characters. Both appear in the header at the top of the community and nowhere else: not in the navigation, not in emails. An empty name falls back to your business name.
The second card, Default feed sort, decides the order members see when they open the feed: Relevant Posts, Newest Posts or Top Posts. Relevant is the default. Members can still switch it themselves, and pinned posts always stay on top whichever order is active.
Relevant suits most communities, because a post with a lively discussion stays visible for longer than a day. Newest suits communities where timing matters, such as daily check-ins.
Design
The community header. Header Layout offers six designs: Borderless, Banner, Cover, Cinematic, Split and Glass. Borderless is the default.
Header Settings changes with the design you pick:
- Borderless has no background color. Instead it has Display Community Title & Description and, while that is on, a Text Color.
- Every other design has a Background Color, which starts as your brand color. Split and Glass build their gradient from it automatically.
- Cover adds an Icon, Glass a Thumbnail.
- All designs except Glass take a header image, separately for Desktop and Mobile, because a wide banner cropped to a phone rarely keeps what mattered.
The Preview switches between desktop and mobile and uses sample data, so you can judge a layout before you have posts. The search field it shows is part of the header, not a setting: search is always available to members. Reset puts every design option back to the default after a confirmation.
Profiles
Three cards: Profile information for all members holds the profile fields you add with Add new field. Member profile in posts decides what appears next to a member's name on posts: Show badges, Show level icons and Show level ring. Admin profile design marks your team with Show admin badge, Show admin ring and an Admin color.
Member profiles and profile fields
Interactions
- Post Boostings are the markers you attach to posts to push them up the feed. You create them with Add boosting.
- Badges are the awards and the rules that hand them out.
- Badge wall tab has a single switch, Show Badges tab. It is on by default and gives members a Badges tab with every badge and the top collectors. Turn it off and the tab disappears, the badges themselves stay.
Gamification
Two systems with different defaults.
- Level System is off until you use Enable Level System. While it is off, nobody earns points and members have no Leaderboard tab.
- Streak System is on from the start. It counts the days in a row a member is active, with options for what counts and how forgiving it is.
Streaks are not private. Members see them in the Streak leaderboard, which sits inside the Leaderboard tab. With the level system off, streaks are counted but members only see them in a dashboard element, if you add one.
Updates
The card Community digest emails controls the periodic summary of what happened, so members who do not open the community daily still know it is alive. Enable digest emails is on by default.
Default interval offers Daily and Weekly, with Weekly preset. It applies to every member who has never saved their own community notification settings, including people who joined long ago. Once a member changes any of those settings, their own choice wins.
The default matters, because most people never change it. Daily suits a busy community. Weekly suits almost everybody else and is the safer starting point: a quiet community sending daily emails teaches members to ignore your emails.
Members choose their own interval, including off, in their profile under Notifications. The wording of the email itself is the Community Digest template in your notification settings.
Open the notification settings
Chat system
Direct messages and group chats between members. Everything here is on by default:
- Enable Chat System switches chat on or off as a whole. Off means members have no chat at all.
- Group chats, with Allow all members to create group chats. Turn it off and only admins create groups; members can still take part in them.
- Allowed media types: Images, Audio and Files. Videos are sent as files, and Audio covers voice messages as well.
Post rules
The two settings that do most of your moderation before it becomes moderation.
The Word blocklist checks posts, comments and answers, both when they are written and when they are edited, and it applies to your team as well. Matching is by whole word and ignores upper and lower case, so a listed word does not catch longer words that merely contain it. List variants separately, and add a phrase of several words as one entry when only that combination is a problem.
Content that matches is hidden immediately and lands under Moderation > Reports in Automatically hidden, with the reason Blocklist word and the words that matched. It stays hidden until somebody on your team releases it.
Allowed media types decides which attachments the composer offers for posts: Images, Videos, Audio and Files.
Moderation: requests and reports
An order to work through them
Set the name, pick the design, decide about chat, then leave the rest alone until the community is running. Gamification, digest intervals and blocklists are all easier to judge when you have real posts and real members to judge them against.