Introduction

The Community hub area of your platform allows you to engage your learners by fostering the sharing of ideas and knowledge inside communities.

Create communities allowing your users to post messages, ask and answer questions, add comments and chat with each other. Community users are called members in your platform and in this article. 

This article explains how you can create and manage communities on your Docebo platform. Communities can only be created and managed by Superadmins and Power Users with granted permissions. To be able to manage communities, Power Users need to be assigned a profile having the Community permissions. Power Users will only be able to manage the communities assigned to them as resources. Learn more about Power Users permissions in the dedicated article. Superadmins and Power Users are referred to as administrators in this article.

Please note! The community name can be customized by community administrators. As a result, the platform users will see the customized community name in their user menu instead of the Community menu.

Creating a community

To create a community, click on the gear icon in the top right corner of your platform and select Community hub in the Communities section. 

• If you are working on a single domain, you will be redirected to the community configuration page. If you have not created a community yet, use the Create community button to start the creation process. 
• If you are working on multiple domains, the communities you have already created will be listed on this page and you can use the plus button in the top right corner to create a new community. If you have not created any  community yet, the page will be blank and you can click on the Create new community button.

In the right panel, enter the community name and click on Create and edit. 

If you are working on multiple domains, a section of the right panel will allow you to select the domains to which the community will be assigned. A community must be assigned to at least one domain. 

Please note! The newly created community will be created with the Unpublished status, meaning it is not visible to users yet. You will need to switch the status to Published for the community to be visible. In this way, you can finish setting up your community before making it available to users. You need to have at least one published community for the Community area to be visible to the platform users in their menu.

Configuring the community settings

Once a community is created, you can start configuring it. On the Settings tab, the following sections are available: 

Please note! If you are working on a single domain, and you click on Community hub  in the Communities section of the menu, you will land on the page allowing you to configure the community. If you are working on multiple domains, you will land on a page listing all the communities you have created. You can click on the community name to access and configure it.

Community information

Change the community name if needed. The community name can be changed at any time. 

Content visibility 

From this section, choose to make the community public or private. 

• Public: the community will be visible to everybody including non-authenticated users and search engines. The Public catalog option must be enabled in order to make communities public. Even though non-authenticated users can view the community, they are not able to interact. The community functionalities like posting, commenting and chatting are restricted to authenticated users. 
• Private: The community will only be visible to authenticated users. If you are working with multiple domains, the community will be visible to the users who have access to the assigned domains.

Email digests

From this section, you can choose when members are subscribed to email digests listing new posts: 

• Automatically, when users are added to the community 
• Only after they have accessed the community for the first time.

Profile names

From this section, you can choose how the first and last names of members are set: 

• The first name and last name are copied from the My profile area of the platform. If they are unavailable, members will be prompted to fill in their name when they first access the community. When this option is selected, members will not be able to modify their name once it has been set. You can also choose to show only the first letter of the members’ last name by selecting the corresponding checkbox.
• Members can create a nickname that will be shown instead of their first and last names. If no nickname is set, the profile will display the member’s first and last name. 

Please note! If you set the profile names to be copied from the My profile area of the platform after some members have already set a nickname, the new setting will not override the previous one. This means that the nicknames will continue to be displayed to preserve anonymity. Members will be prompted to remove their nickname when accessing their profile in the community but it will not be mandatory.

Gamification badges

You can create a collection of community badges by clicking on the Create community badges option. The created collection of badges includes the badges that we recommend to use. This action can only be done once. After the creation of the collection, you will no longer see the Create community badges option. The created badges will only be assigned to the branches that are assigned to the community. 

The community collection of badges will be added to the list found on the Badge management page with the Built-in type. 

Please note! In order to create the community collection of badges, the Gamification app should be activated on your platform.

For more information on gamification in the community, read the article Using gamification in your community.

Assign to domains 

If you are working with multiple domains, the assigned domains will be listed in a specific section. Editing this list may hinder the proper functioning of the community. Thus, you need to contact the Help desk to add or remove domains. 

Once you have selected all the settings, you can publish the community. Created communities are unpublished by default.

If you leave the page without saving, all your modifications will be lost.

Please note! Once a community is created, you cannot delete. However, you can unpublish it if you want to remove it for your users.

Managing spaces

Spaces are the main way to organize the community content by topic. The visibility of spaces can be customized to make them visible to specific groups and/or branches. Members can choose to join or leave specific spaces, thus subscribing or unsubscribing from the space’s posts appearing in their feed and email digests. You can also create sub-spaces inside one space.

Once a member leaves a space, you cannot add them back. However, they can choose to join the space again.

More information in the article Creating and managing spaces

Moderating communities

As a Superadmin or a Power User (with granted permissions), you can moderate the community content. From the Moderation tab, configure a set of rules for pre-moderation. You can also assign moderators to the community. Moderators are members who have special permissions allowing them to moderate content.

More information in the artice Administrator guide to moderation

Managing the Deny list

If you think a member does not comply with the community’s rules and would like to prevent them from accessing it, you can add them to the Deny list. All the blocked members are listed in the Deny list tab with their details (name, email, date at which they were blocked and person who blocked them).

From this page, you can block members using the Add member to Deny list button. Blocked members will no longer be able to access the community. You can also block a member from their individual profile in the community by clicking on the ellipsis menu next to the member’s name and selecting Block member. Learn more about the use of the community as an administrator. 

As a community administrator, you can add back a blocked member by clicking on Unblock at the end of the member’s row. Community moderators cannot unblock members.

Please note! If you are working with several communities on different domains, you may want to block the access of the member to all the communities. By blocking a member in the Deny list tab of a community, you deny them access to this specific community but they could still be able to access other communities. To prevent a user from accessing any community, you need to block them in each individual one.

Configuring the chat settings in the community

From the Chat tab, you can configure the permissions and moderation settings of the community chat. 

Permissions

From this section, configure how members can chat with each other: 

• Administrators can start a chat with any member
• Moderators can start a chat with any member
• Members can start a chat with administrators
• Members can start a chat with moderators
• Members can start a chat with other members: Choose if this applies to all members or a custom selection of members belonging to certain groups and/or branches.

Administrators and moderators can always chat independently of these settings.

Chat moderation

From this section, you can choose to apply the moderation rules set in the Moderation tab to the chat by enabling the corresponding checkbox. If you do not enable this option, no moderation will apply to the chat.

Customizing the community

The Customization tab offers several options for you to personalize your community. You can create content in multiple languages using the language selector. 

Greeting banner

From this section, you can add a banner to your community home page. This is a great way to explain to users what the community is about. 

You can choose to make the greeting banner available to non-authenticated users only, to authenticated users only or both. You can also customize the banner for these two categories of users. To make the greeting banner available to non-authenticated users, you must set the community to be accessible to them from the Settings tab.

To activate the greeting banner, enable the corresponding checkbox and from there: 

• Customize the banner title. This field cannot be left empty. If you do not make any edits to this field, the title will be: 👋Welcome to [community name]! 
• Customize the message displayed in the banner.  

A preview of your banner is shown under each section that you have enabled. 

Branding

Members have the possibility to upvote other members’ contributions.  From this section, personalize the emoji and label of the upvote and upvoted buttons. If you do not make any changes, the labels will be Upvote and Upvoted.

Posting 

From this section, you can: 

• Customize the message that will appear when a member starts writing a new post
• Customize the Write a post button label
• Choose if members can share their posts on social networks and select the social networks you want to include. This option is enabled by default but you can disable it from here. 

Please note that post sharing is only for public communities. Posts from private communities cannot be shared and cannot be accessed by non-authenticated users. If the community is private, the Post sharing section will be disabled.