A community turns a platform of readers into a platform of people who talk to each other. It brings posts, comments, reactions, member profiles 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.
Once it is on, the community appears in your navigation and in your members' navigation at the same time.
Name and description
The first thing to set is what your community is called. That name appears to your members wherever the community is mentioned, so it is worth a minute of thought.
The description is shorter than it looks: one or two sentences that tell a new member what this space is for.
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.
Who gets in
Community access works like everything else in your platform: assign it directly, through a group, or through a purchase.
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.
Decide about points early
The level system rewards members with points and lets them level up. It is off by default, and turning it on later is easy, but turning it off later is awkward: members who collected points notice when the points disappear.
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.