Introduction
The Community area of your platform offers a great way to interact and share ideas with other platform users. In a community, you can ask questions, answer other users’ questions, share your insights and chat with others. Communities can be private, meaning they are only visible to the platform users or public, meaning they are visible to everyone, including anonymous users. On all cases, the community’s functionalities detailed in this article are only available to signed-in users.
Tip: To know if the community you are using is public or private, open the community page while logged out. If you can still see the page content, then your community is public.
Please note! In order to track anonymous Communities user sessions, Docebo is introducing an additional technical cookie named community_session to the list of cookies of the Docebo platform. The new cookie will be strictly necessary to track anonymous user sessions. Check out the complete list of cookies used on the Docebo platform.
When a platform administrator creates a community, they will add users that become members of the community. This article explains how you can make use of the community’s functionalities such as creating and sharing content as well as interacting with other members. For a detailed presentation of the community areas, refer to the article Navigating the community as a member.
Writing posts in the community
The community allows you to share your knowledge and a great way to do so is writing posts. From the home page, click on the Write a post button on the top of the left panel. Please note that depending on the administrators’ settings, this button might have a different label.
From the left drop-down menu, select a space. Each post must be assigned to a space. Only the spaces you have joined or have been added to will appear in the drop-down menu.
From the right drop-down menu, select a post type:
- Post: Generic type to share updates, thoughts or content with the community
- Article: In-depth insights and information for members to explore. Articles must be at least 1000 characters long. If your text is shorter, consider expanding it or turning it into a post
- Question: When seeking advice or information from the other members. When your question is answered, you can select an answer as the Best answer thus identifying the question as Solved. Community administrators can also mark an answer as Best answer.
Enter the post title and body content and click on Publish when you are done. If you want to go back to the home page without publishing your post, click on Cancel. All your changes will be lost and you will not be able to retrieve them.
Text editor
The text editor offers a wide range of options:
- Formatting options: bold, italic, strikethrough, blockquotes, heading levels, and bulleted and ordered lists
- Images: Images can be uploaded by entering the image URL. Supported file types are .PNG, .JPG and .GIF
- Media: Media can be added to the content by entering the media URL. Links from Youtube, Vimeo, video files, PDF files and many more will be expanded into a rich preview.
- Links: You can add external links as well as links from your platform. The post content will display a preview of the page you have linked.
Content moderation
Depending on the administrator’s settings, your post might be subject to pre-moderation. This means that your post will need to be approved by a community administrator or moderator before being published. In this case, you will see a banner informing you that your post has been put in the pre-moderation queue and you will receive a notification to inform you if your post has been approved and published. In case your post was rejected, the administrator or moderator will provide a rejection reason that you can use to improve your post and submit it again.
Once your post is published, it will appear to all the members that have joined the related space. You can edit or remove your own posts at any time by clicking on the ellipsis menu in the post area and choosing Edit or Remove.
Please note! Depending on the administrators’ settings, posting might be restricted in some spaces. These spaces will only display posts added by the administrators themselves and you will not be able to add any. However, you might still be able to add comments and answers in these restricted spaces.
Interacting with other members
On top of posts, the community provides a great way to interact with other members. This gives you the possibility to seek and provide answers. To do so, you can comment on the existing posts or send a private message to other community members.
Commenting
Access a post page from the home page or the space page. Once you have added a comment or a reply, they will appear in real-time in the comments section but you can always edit or remove them by clicking on the ellipsis menu in the comment section and selecting the corresponding option. Similarly, comments posted by other members will appear in real-time in the comments section.
Top-level comments are sorted based on the number of upvotes and their recency. While the replies in the threads are in chronological order to allow you to have a continuous discussion.
Please note! Comments might be locked for some posts.
From the comment section, you can perform the following actions:
Adding a comment to the post
If no comments have been added yet, the section will be blank. Type your comment in the dedicated text field and click on Comment. Your comment will be visible to all the members who can see the post.
Replying to an existing comment
Below the comment, click on Reply, enter your reply and click on Comment. Your reply will be visible to all members who can see the post. You can also click on the ellipsis menu in the comment and select Private reply to send a private message to the post author.
Adding a comment to a thread
If someone has already replied to an existing comment, you can add your reply to this thread by clicking on Reply under the initial reply. Enter your text in the dedicated field and click on Comment.
Upvoting
You can upvote a comment or a reply by clicking on the corresponding button. Remember that the upvote button can have different labels and emojis depending on the administrators’ settings. You can cancel your upvote by clicking again on the same upvote button.
Subscribing to comments
Subscribing to comments allows you to follow them and be notified whenever new content is added. Subscribed content can be identified by the bell icon.
Subscriptions work as follows:
- Post authors are automatically subscribed to top-level comments
- When you comment or upvote a post, you are automatically subscribed to top-level comments.
- When you reply to a comment or upvote it, you are automatically subscribed to the comment thread.
- From the Subscribe button, you can choose to subscribe to top-level comments only, threads only, or both. The same button allows you to unsubscribe with the same options. You can also unsubscribe from a specific engaged thread while staying subscribed to the others. Click on the ellipsis menu on any message of the thread and choose Unsubscribe.
- When mentioned by another member in a post, you are automatically subscribed to all the comments of the post. When mentioned by another member in a comment, you are automatically subscribed to this comment thread.
Chatting
From a post, click on the member’s name to access their community profile. On the profile page, you will have the possibility to start a chat (if this is the first time you are messaging this member) or continue your existing chat.
To start chatting, click on Start a chat. Enter your message in the text field and click on Send. Once a conversation is started with a member, the messages will be displayed when you access their community profile page, with the newest message appearing at the top. The chats that you have started can also be accessed from the home page left panel, Messaging section. Unread messages can be identified with the unread count badge.
Please note! The Messaging section will not be displayed on the homepage until you have started a chat with a member.
To continue an existing chat, access the member’s community profile and click on Open the chat with [member’s name]. In the same way, enter your message and click on Send. As with posting and commenting, you can make use of the text editor to apply formatting options to your text, and add images.
Please note! Depending on the administrators’ settings, messaging might be restricted. You might be able to chat with all members, a selection of members or no other members.
Reporting content
As a community member, you can report content that you consider inappropriate. You can report posts, comments or private messages by clicking on the ellipsis menu in the top part of the post or comment and selecting Report.
When you report content, the community administrators and moderators will be notified and they can decide to remove the post and optionally block the content’s author.
Please note! When reporting private messages, the community administrators and moderators will only see the reported message as well as the message immediately preceding and following it. The rest of the conversation remains private.
Searching for community content in your platform
Using your platform’s global search, you can look for community content. When you type keywords in the search bar, the related posts and comments will appear. Click on the magnifying glass icon or on All results to display all the results matching your search criteria. When you enter keywords in the search bar, the posts and comments will be displayed at the end of the list and in the Community tab when clicking on All results.
Search results depend on visibility, meaning that the search results will only include the content you have visibility on.
In the Community tab, you can use the Filter area to choose to display posts only or comments only.
From the drop-down menu on the left, you can sort results by:
- Best match
- Most upvoted
- Newest to oldest
- Oldest to newest
More information on the use of the Search bar in the platform.