A community turns a platform of readers into a platform of people who talk to each other. It brings posts, comments, reactions, member profiles, chat and, if you want it, points and badges.
Switching it on
Community is one of the features you turn on yourself. Until you do, none of it exists: no menu entry, no settings, nothing for members to see.
Switching it on adds a Community entry to your admin menu and to your members' navigation. A dialog then asks Add to member navigation?. Choose Add to navigation to open your navigation settings, where you can rename the entry and move it to the right place. The entry is called Community until you change it there.
Switching the feature off again removes the entry and makes the community unreachable, but deletes nothing. Posts, forums and members are all still there when you switch it back on.
Name and description
Under Information you set the Community Name and a Description of up to 255 characters.
Both appear in one place only: the header at the top of the community, for you and for your members. They do not change the navigation entry, emails or the digest. Leave the name empty and the header shows your business name instead.
The default header design, Borderless, shows the name and description only while Display Community Title & Description is on. The Design tab offers six header layouts in total.
The first structure decision
Your community is built from areas and forums. An area groups forums; a forum holds posts.
The mistake almost everybody makes is starting with too many. Three forums that are busy read as a living community. Twelve forums that are empty read as an abandoned one, and members quietly stop coming back.
Start with two or three. Add the fourth when the first three cannot hold the conversation any more.
A new area starts as a draft. Nothing inside a draft area is visible to members, whatever the forums in it are set to, so set the area to visible once its forums are ready.
Who gets in
Turning the community on gives nobody access yet. Access is granted forum by forum, and a member without any forum sees an empty community with the message that they do not have access to any forums yet.
There are several ways to grant it:
- Community > Members: Assign member opens the Add Member wizard with the steps Members, Forums and Badges. For each area you choose No access, Individual forums or All forums. The sub-tab Groups does the same for whole user groups through Add Groups.
- The area itself: under Edit Area, the tabs Members and Groups grant access to every forum in that area, including forums you add to it later.
- The member list and the member profile: community forums are part of the normal access tools there, including bulk Add Access.
- A purchase: a product can hand out forums like any other resource.
All forums in the wizard means the forums that exist right now. A forum you create next month is not included. If people should automatically see every new forum in an area, grant access on the area instead.
Most platforms give the whole community to everybody and use forums to separate topics. Some sell access to a private forum as part of a product. Both work; the second only makes sense once the first is busy.
Forums on request
A forum set to On request is listed for every member, but locked. Members click Request access, and you decide under Moderation > Forum access. Members you have already granted access to get straight in without asking.
This suits a forum that should be visible as an offer, such as a mastermind group or a coaching circle, without being open to everyone.
Moderation: requests and reports
Decide about points early
The level system rewards members with points and lets them level up. It is off by default.
Turning it off later is not a disaster: points stop being awarded and the Leaderboard tab disappears, but the points members already collected stay on their profiles. The reason to decide early is the other direction. Points are only awarded from the moment the system is on, nothing is counted backwards, so members who were active before you switched it on start from the same zero as everybody else.
Decide before you invite people, not after.
Seed it before you open it
An empty community is a hard place to be first in. Before you tell anybody it exists, write the first few posts yourself: a welcome, one question people can answer in a sentence, one thing worth reacting to.
Members join a conversation far more readily than they start one.
Then look at it through a member account. As an admin you see every forum regardless of access, so a community that looks complete to you can be empty for the people you invited.