Setting up the community

Turning the community on takes minutes. Making it worth having takes months, and starts before you enable it.

Turning the community on takes minutes. Making it worth having takes months, and starts before you enable it.

Set it up

1. Enable the community in Knowledge.
2. Create a few topics, named for what people would discuss.
3. Decide who may post: everyone, or signed-in users only.
4. Set up moderation.
5. Seed it with real content before announcing it.

Seed it first

The step that decides whether it survives. An empty forum tells the first visitor that nobody is here, and they do not come back.

Before announcing it, post genuine questions with genuine answers, from your team. Ten real exchanges is enough to make it look like a place where things happen.

Signed-in posting

Almost always the right choice. Anonymous posting brings spam at a rate that will consume your moderation time entirely.

Someone has to be there daily

In the first months, every question needs an answer within a day, from you if nobody else. A question sitting unanswered for a week teaches everyone that asking is pointless.

That commitment is the actual cost of a community, and it does not end.

Decide when to stop

Worth agreeing in advance what success looks like after six months, and what you will do if it does not happen. Closing a quiet community is a reasonable outcome; leaving it visible and dead is not.

See also

• What the community is and whether to turn it on
• Moderating end-user content
• Fighting spam in the Help Center