You build the community from the admin side. Your members experience something rather different, and it is worth knowing what that is before you make decisions about it.
The fastest way to see it is to sign in as one of them.
Members see up to six tabs: Feed, Forums, Members, Leaderboard, Badges and My Profile. Two of them depend on your settings, and the search sits next to the tabs in the header.
The feed
Where most members spend their time. By default it is one stream of posts from every forum the member can reach. The sidebar lists their areas and forums; picking one narrows the feed to it.
They sort by Relevant Posts, Newest Posts or Top Posts. The order they start with is the one you set as the default feed sort, and pinned posts stay on top in every order.
Forums
The structure you built, grouped by area. Each forum shows its type, how many posts it has, when the last one was written, and a counter of posts the member has not read yet. Opening a forum marks it as read; there is no separate button for it.
A few markers explain why a forum behaves differently:
- Moderated: posts wait for approval before anybody sees them.
- Archived: readable, but closed to new posts, comments and answers.
- On request: locked until the member clicks Request access and you approve. Until then the button reads Request pending, and after a rejection Request again.
A member without access to any forum sees an empty page that says so. That is the most common reason a new member reports that the community is broken.
Members
A directory with four sub-tabs: Members, Admins, Online and Map. Each entry shows the level, the points as pts, whether the person is online or when they were last seen, and a Chat button while chat is on.
The directory lists people who hold access to at least one forum: directly, through a user group, or through an area, whether they were added to the area themselves or belong to one of its groups.
The Map places members roughly where they last signed in to this community, based on the network address of that sign-in, not on a profile field. A sign-in to another community on the platform never moves a pin here. Only members whose sign-in carried a location appear. Members can hide themselves: in their account profile, on the Privacy tab, they turn off Show me on the member map in the card Community privacy. That covers the community only; your own member list still shows where somebody last signed in. You cannot switch the tab off. In an international community this is often the thing that makes people feel they are somewhere real; in a small local one it can reveal more than people expect, so look at it before you invite them, and tell them the switch exists.
Leaderboard
Present only while the level system is on. It ranks members by points for All Time, This Month or This Week, calls out Your rank, and shows under Levels how members are spread across the levels.
If streaks are on, the Streak leaderboard sits underneath. Streaks are therefore public, not a private motivator: switching on the level system puts everybody's streak next to their name.
Badges
The badge wall, present while Show Badges tab is on. It shows the Top badge collectors, the member's own count as Your badges, and under All badges every active badge, with a progress bar for those a rule hands out.
Showing the unearned ones is the point. A member who can see that a badge exists at fifty posts, and that they are at thirty-two, has a target; one who only sees their own three badges has a souvenir.
Profiles
Their own profile under My Profile, and everybody else's one click from any name. A profile shows posts, Followers, Following and Points, the level and badges, and the profile fields you defined. Points stay visible even while the level system is off.
On their own profile, members switch between Your posts and Saved posts; saved posts are private to them. On somebody else's they see that person's posts, with Follow and Send message. Comments are not listed on a profile.
Member profiles and profile fields
Search
Search is always available; there is no setting for it. Members look across posts, discussions, announcements, comments and members, and can narrow the results with All Content, Posts, Discussions, Announcements, Comments and Members, as well as by forum with All Forums and by boosting with All Markings.
A hit inside a comment opens the post it belongs to with the comment highlighted. That behaviour is what makes search worth having: the answer somebody needs is usually in the twelfth comment of a thread, not in a post title.
Notifications
Members do not find notification settings inside the community. They are in their account profile, on the Notifications tab, in the card Community notifications.
There they decide which emails they get for single events, such as replies, mentions, reactions or an admin pinning their post, or turn community emails off entirely with Send any community emails at all. They pick the digest Cadence (Off, Daily or Weekly) with a Day of week and an Hour (local), and they can enable Browser push, set Quiet hours and Mute specific areas.
Your digest interval is only where they start. Once they change anything here, their own choice applies.
Looking at it as a member does
Sign in as a member who is not you, ideally one who joined recently and is not in every group. A community looks complete from an admin account, which sees every forum regardless of access, and much emptier from an account that does not.
That gap is where most community problems live.