Managing topics and posts

Topics are the community's structure. Few of them, named for what people discuss, and reviewed as the community grows.

Topics are the community's structure. Few of them, named for what people discuss, and reviewed as the community grows.

Manage them

1. Open the community in your help centre.
2. Add a topic, or open one to edit it.
3. Set who may view and who may post.
4. Move posts between topics where they have landed in the wrong one.

Three or four topics to start

Questions, ideas, and one or two subject areas. A community opening with twelve topics looks abandoned on day one, because activity divided twelve ways is invisible.

Split a topic when it is busy enough to be hard to follow. That is a good problem and it arrives later than people expect.

Name them for the reader's intent

"Questions" and "Feature ideas" tell somebody where their post belongs. Product-team names and internal categories do not, and posts end up wherever the poster guessed.

Move posts rather than replying about placement

A post in the wrong topic is a two-second fix for a moderator. Asking the poster to repost it loses the thread and discourages the next person.

An idle topic is worth removing

A topic with three posts from last year tells visitors nobody is here. Merge it into a busier one; the content survives and the community looks like what it is.

Watch what people post about

Recurring questions in the community are articles you have not written, or articles nobody can find. Either way the community is telling you something the analytics will not.

See also

• Setting up the community
• Moderating end-user content
• What the community is and whether to turn it on