Community - Create/Edit

To create a new community, select Community from the New Community drop-down menu on the All Communities page. This option is only available to community moderators and administrators.

To edit a community, on the Community page, select Edit Community from the Options drop-down menu.

Details

Enter the following information for the community:

  • Title - Enter a title for the community, up to 70 characters. This title will appear at the top of the community.
  • Description - Enter the community description up to 3,000 characters. This field includes rich text editing options.
  • Banner - The banner image appears at the top of the community and at the top of each community posting. Add a banner file by dragging and dropping a file into the Attachment area. You can also attach a file by clicking the Select a file button and select a file from your computer. Note: The drag-and-drop functionality is not supported by Internet Explorer browsers. For best results, the banner image should be 1004 x 150 pixels. The Image Restrictions section below provides a complete list of image attachment restrictions.

Community Feed

A Community Feed is a feed that is displayed on the Main tab of the community. The Community Feed may display the latest activity for the specific community. In addition, community members may be able to create discussion postings directly from the Community Feed. All updates not posted directly to Community Feed, such as "received a reply" or "has created the discussion" updates, will not display if the update was made more than 365 days ago.

Select whether the Community Feed is enabled for the community. For new communities, the feed is enabled by default.

Membership

This option is available when creating and editing a community. This option enables moderators to determine how users become a member of the community. The following options are available:

  • Invitation - When this option is selected, users who are within the community availability see a Join button on the Community - Main page. When a user clicks the Join button, they become a member of the community. If enabled, the Joined Community email trigger is activated when the invitee joins the community.

Note: When editing a community, and an administrator changes the membership setting from Invitation to Auto-enrollment, all users who meet the availability selection criteria are automatically enrolled in the community. If the administrator concurrently adds another OU to the availability selection criteria, that OU is also automatically enrolled in the community. Use Case: ClosedFred is the administrator for a community. The community he created can only be joined by accepting an invitation. After some internal discussion, it is determined that the community instead needs to be automatically accessible by all employees who meet the availability criteria. Fred edits the community membership setting from Invitation to Auto-enrollment, thereby automatically enrolling every employee who needs to access the community.

Auto-enrollment

When this option is selected, users who are within the community availability are automatically added as members of the community when the community is saved. If enabled, the Joined Community email trigger is activated and an email is sent to the new member.

Note: When editing a community, and an administrator changes the membership setting from Auto-enrollment to Invitation, all users who are currently members of the community will remain members. Any future community members will be required to join via invitation. For example, if the community moderator changes the membership setting from Auto-enrollment to Invitation and concurrently adds a new organizational unit (OU) to the availability selection criteria, that new OU must join the community by accepting an invitation.Use Case: ClosedHarry is the administrator for a community. The community he created automatically enrolls every employee who meets the availability criteria. Management has decided that, because of the sensitivity of information posted within the community, all future members should not be automatically enrolled but should instead be extended an invitation based on OU selection criteria.

Custom HTML Widget

The Custom HTML Widget section is only available if enabled by a backend setting. This section enables community moderators to upload an HTML file (.htm or .html), up to 5 MB in size. Once the community is saved, the HTML data is rendered and displayed in the upper-left corner of the community.

Add an HTML file by dragging and dropping the file into the Attachment area. You can also attach a file by clicking the Select a file button and select a file from your computer. Note: The drag-and-drop functionality is not supported by Internet Explorer browsers. Once the file is selected, a preview of the HTML widget is displayed in the section. If an empty file or no file is selected, then the HTML widget does not appear on the community homepage.

Important: All HTML tags are currently accepted by the Custom HTML widget. Because malicious HTML files may be uploaded, this is a potential security risk and organizations may choose to disable this functionality. The style, script, iframe, and img tags are not supported in the HTML area of Communities.

Availability Selection Criteria

Select the availability for the community. Availability can be set by OU, group, or specific users. This determines which users within the system can view the community. See Knowledge Bank/Community - Availability and Action Groups.

This section can only be configured by community moderators or users who have permission to manage communities or edit the availability of communities.

  • When editing a community, any existing creator constraints that are automatically applied to the community's availability are displayed at the bottom of the section. This enables administrators and community moderators to fully understand the availability of the community. If the creator constraints change, then the updated constraints are not implemented or displayed.

The following options are available for each selected criterion:

  • Remove - Click the X to remove the selected criterion.
  • Include Subordinates - Select this option to include all subordinate OUs or users in the availability.
  • Action Group - From the drop-down, select the role of the selected users:
    • Visitor - Users within the availability criterion can view postings.
    • Member - Users within the availability criterion can create postings, edit and delete their own postings, and reply to postings.
    • Expert - Users within the availability criterion can serve as experts for Q&A postings. When an expert responds to a Q&A posting, the Q&A posting is automatically marked as Answered and the expert's reply is visually distinguished as an expert response.
    • Community Moderator - Users within the availability criterion can edit, share, and copy the community and create and delete topics.
    • Custom Action Group - Administrators have the ability to create custom action groups with a custom set of community permissions.

Overwrite availability changes for all child topics

This option is not available when creating a community because the new community does not have any topics. Select this option to apply the availability settings of this community to all topics associated with the community. When this option is selected, the availability of all of the community's topics is overwritten with this community's availability settings. Users can only view topics for which they are within the topic availability.

  • This option is not available when editing a cohort community.

If this option is selected when editing a community that contains a shared topic, then a warning pop-up is displayed when the community is saved to indicate that the availability of a shared topic will be overwritten. Click OK to overwrite the availability for all topics. Or, click Cancel to not overwrite the availability for all topics.

Done or Cancel

After entering the appropriate information, click Done to create the community. Otherwise, click Cancel to cancel the community creation. If enabled, the Joined Community email is triggered when a user becomes a member of a community.

Image Restrictions

The following file types are allowed:

File Type Extension
Image
  • bmp
  • gif
  • jpeg/jpg
  • png