Everything about your community that is not a post or a person lives here, across eight tabs.
Information
The name and description of your community. The name is what members see wherever the community is referred to.
Design
How the community looks: the header layout, the background colour, and options for whichever design you pick. The preview switches between desktop and mobile, and both are worth a look before you save.
Search is part of this tab as well, so you decide whether members can search the community at all.
Profiles
Profile fields and how the member card appears next to posts. It has its own article.
Member profiles and profile fields
Interactions
Badges and boostings.
- Badges are the awards and the rules that hand them out.
- Boostings are the markers you attach to posts to make them stand out.
Gamification
Levels and streaks, both off until you switch them on, both covered in their own article.
Updates
What your community sends, and this is where the digest lives.
Digest emails are a periodic summary of what happened, so members who do not open the community daily still know it is alive. You enable them and set the default interval for new members, such as daily or weekly.
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 can change their own interval in their community preferences.
Chat-System
Direct messages, off until you switch them on. Two decisions come with it, and the chat article covers both.
Post-Rules
The two settings that do most of your moderation before it becomes moderation.
- The word blocklist catches any post containing a listed word.
- Allowed media types decide what members may attach to a post.
The moderation article covers both in full.
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, digests and blocklists are all easier to judge when you have real posts and real members to judge them against.