The feed is where the community actually happens. You get the same feed your members do, plus the controls that come with being an admin.
Writing a post
Pick the forum, write, publish. The forum choice matters: it decides who sees the post and, in a moderated forum, whether it appears at once.
The composer opens on two tabs, Post and Discussion. The tab decides both the editor you write in and the forums you can pick: the Post tab lists your feed and announcement forums, the Discussion tab lists your discussion forums.
The Post tab is the short composer.
- Media: images, video, audio and files, within the media types you allow.
- Backgrounds, which turn a one-line post into something that catches the eye in a scroll.
The Discussion tab is the long-form editor. It adds a title field of its own and a full toolbar.
- Formatting: headings, bold, italic, strikethrough, underline, bullet and ordered lists.
- Blocks: code blocks, dividers and info boxes for something that should stand out from the paragraph around it.
- Media: images, video, audio and files, within the media types you allow.
- Links, including links to your own content.
Emoji work in both composers and in comments. GIFs are for comments only: neither post composer has a GIF picker.
A short post with a question gets replies. A long post with an announcement gets read and scrolled past. Both are fine, as long as you know which one you are writing.
Polls
A post can carry a poll instead of ending in a question nobody answers. Members vote, everybody sees the result, and you can open the list of who voted for what.
Polls are the cheapest engagement you will ever get: voting costs one click, and a member who voted is far more likely to comment.
Comments, replies and answers
Members comment, and comments can be replied to. Both can be reacted to.
In a Q&A forum, one comment can be marked as the accepted answer, the one that solved the question. No other forum type offers it, and the type is a setting on the forum. Useful in a support-shaped community, where the next person with the same problem needs the answer and not the thread.
Reactions
Posts and comments both take reactions. They are worth more than they look: for a member who will never write a post, a reaction is the whole of their participation, and it feeds the points system if you have it on.
Pinning
Pin a post and it stays at the top of its forum. Use it for the rules, the welcome, or the thing you need everybody to have read.
Pin one thing. Pin three and members learn to scroll past the whole block.
Sorting
The feed offers newest, relevant and top. Newest is the raw chronology, relevant weighs engagement, top surfaces what did best.
Members can switch. What you choose in your own view does not change what they see.
Saving
Anybody can save a post to come back to it, and saved posts sit in their own list. It works for you as well, and it is a better way to keep track of a thread you owe an answer to than remembering it.
Editing and deleting
Your own posts can be edited and deleted from the post menu. As an admin you can also remove anybody's post, which belongs with the moderation tools rather than the writing tools.
Moderation: requests and reports
Drafts and scheduling
A post can be saved as a draft or scheduled for a time in the future, and both are covered in their own article.