Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Turning the community on takes minutes. Making it worth having takes months, and starts before you enable it.
Set it up
- In Knowledge, click Settings in the sidebar, select Activate community and click Save. It is live to end users from that moment.
- Create a few topics, named for what people would discuss.
- Decide how you moderate: every post held for approval, or only posts containing keywords you list.
- Consider moderator groups, which let you give agents and trusted end users the ability to flag posts for moderation.
- Seed it with real content before announcing it.
Read step one twice. Activating makes the community visible immediately, so create the topics and the seed content first, in that order, or your customers arrive at an empty forum with no topics in 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.
Choose the moderation shape early
Holding every post for approval is safe and slow: the person who wrote it waits for somebody to approve it before anybody sees it, and in a young community that delay is what kills the conversation.
Keyword moderation lets normal posts appear at once and queues only the ones containing words you named. That is usually the better trade, and the keyword list is worth revisiting after the first month of real posts rather than guessing it up front.
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.
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