Frequently asked questions in Communities
Find answers to the questions that Communities users ask most often.- Can I join any community?
- I just joined a community and am finding lots of useful information. How do I extend membership to my colleagues who might also benefit from membership?
- What is the difference between a bookmark and a feed?
- Can I create a community forum and make it private?
- Is it possible to edit forum posts that another person has added?
- How do I archive topics in a community forum?
- How can I collaborate with other members of my community?
- How do I create different distribution lists within a community?
- What is a widget?
- Why add widgets to my community?
- How do I restrict members from adding content to a community?
- How do I unsubscribe from community emails?
- How do I keep up-to-date with the latest activity in my community?
- How do I find out what communities a person is a member of?
- I accidentally clicked the Leave Community button for a community that I own. How do I get reinstated as a community owner?
- How do I replace the image used as the logo for my community?
Can I join any community?
- You can join any public community that has public access. Some public communities have moderated access, which means that request membership and your request must be approved by a community owner. Restricted communities limit membership to a specified group, and be added by a community owner to become a member.
I just joined a community and am finding lots of useful information. How do I extend membership to my colleagues who might also benefit from membership?
- You must be a community owner to add members to a community. Why not send a link to the community to the people who you think might be interested in joining, or ask a community owner to add them as members. Community owners and members of public communities can also invite people to join a community. The invitee receives an email notification inviting them to join, which they can accept or reject.
What is the difference between a bookmark and a feed?
- A bookmark is a pointer to a web site that makes it easy for you to retrieve the URL or web page at a later date. You can add bookmarks to a community from web sites or directly from your community. A feed is a regularly updated summary of content from a web site, along with links to full versions of that content. Community members can subscribe to feeds containing content of interest to the community, allowing them to access updated content from the feed without having to leave Communities.
Can I create a community forum and make it private?
- You can only add a forum to a community when you are a community owner. If the community is public, anyone who has access to Communities can see the content of the forum. If your community is private, only community members can see the content of the forum.
Is it possible to edit forum posts that another person has added?
- Yes, but only if you are a community owner.
How do I archive topics in a community forum?
- There is currently no way to archive topics from a community forum.
How can I collaborate with other members of my community?
- You can share ideas and information with other members of your community by posting topics to the discussion forum, sending email notifications, and adding bookmarks and feeds to the community. You can also collaborate on shared projects using community activities or a wiki, if your community has one.
How do I create different distribution lists within a community?
- If you are a community owner, you can create subcommunities within a community to bring together a subset of community members. This functionality is useful when you want to set up distribution lists that don't include every community member, or when you want to create specific focus groups within a community.
What is a widget?
- A widget is a self-contained, HTML-based representation of a software application. You can add widgets to communities from the selection available in the content palette.
Why add widgets to my community?
- Add widgets to your community allows you to make extra functionality available to community members. For example, adding the Wiki widget makes a wiki available for members to collaborate and create community content together. You must be a community owner to add widgets to a community.
How do I restrict members from adding content to a community?
- If you are a community owner, you can remove any of the widgets in a community. For example, if you want to stop members from adding bookmarks to a community, you can remove the Bookmarks widget from the community by going to the widget action menu and selecting Hide or Remove. Hiding the widget removes it temporarily, but removing the widget deletes all of the content associated with the widget. You can add the widgets back to the community at any time by clicking the Customize button at the top of the community page and selecting the widget.
As a community owner, you can also restrict community members from adding content to the community blog or wiki, or from uploading files to the community by editing their membership role. To change the access level of community members, select Community Actions -> Edit Community, select the Blog, Files, or Wiki tab, and specify what the role that you want to assign to community members. All members are assigned the same role.
Note: You must be logged in to access the Community Actions menu.
How do I unsubscribe from community emails?
- There is currently no option available for unsubscribing from community emails within Communities. As a workaround, consider setting up a filter in your email client.
How do I keep up-to-date with the latest activity in my community?
- You can stay current with what is going on your community by subscribing to the different pages in the community. To subscribe to a community page, open the page and click the link next to the feed icon
at the bottom of the page. For example, you can see when new members join the community by subscribing to the Members page.How do I find out what communities a person is a member of?
- The easiest way to find out what communities a person belongs to is to open Communities, look for that person's name, and click it. A list of the public communities that the person belongs to displays.
I accidentally clicked the Leave Community button for a community that I own. How do I get reinstated as a community owner?
- If you are the only owner of a community, you cannot leave that community. If you were able to leave the community, that means that there must be at least one other owner who can reinstate you as an owner.
How do I replace the image used as the logo for my community?
- You must be a community owner to edit the community logo. To replace the community logo, select Community Actions -> Edit Community and click Upload a Community Image.
Note: You must be logged in to access the Community Actions menu.
Parent topic
Communities overviews, how-tos, and FAQs
|
| |||||