Setting up communities

A community is a discussion space your organization runs for its members -- a place for ongoing conversation between events and campaigns, organized by topic, team or interest.

Communities have two halves, and knowing which half you are in saves a lot of confusion. The workspace side, under Communities in your sidebar, is where you set them up: create, rename, change visibility, delete. The member side is where the community actually lives -- where posts are written, replies happen, and people follow along. Organizers take part there as members, exactly like everyone else. See Community for what that looks like.

What you can see

Communities in your workspace sidebar lists every community your organization runs, with its name, whether it is listed or unlisted, its address, and its description. Clicking a row opens it for editing. The same list appears in the sidebar's drill-in, alongside a shortcut to create a new one.

Creating a community requires the Core plan or above. If your organization is on the free plan the list is replaced by an upgrade prompt. Communities you already have keep working if you later move to a lower plan -- you simply cannot create new ones.

Creating a community

Choose Create community from the Communities page, or New community from the sidebar. The form asks for:

• Name, up to 100 characters.
• Slug -- the short address the community lives at. It fills itself in from the name until you edit it, and is forced to lowercase with hyphens.
• Description, optional, up to 500 characters.
• Icon and colour, chosen from a small set of presets. Both are optional, and both are set here only -- they are not editable afterwards, so pick them now if you want them.
• Visibility, as two choices.

The visibility choice is the one to get right:

• Listed -- shown to every member of your organization in their Communities list.
• Unlisted -- hidden from that list. Members reach it by link, and it appears in their list once they join.

Both kinds are readable by the members of your organization. Visibility controls whether a community is advertised, not who is allowed in. Unlisted is for a community you want to hand out deliberately rather than have everyone stumble into, not for one you need to keep secret.

If the slug you want is taken, the form says so and suggests an available one. The slug saved is reserved, so the form treats it as taken and suggests an alternative.

Once created, you land in the community itself, on the member side. Note how you got there: there is no link from the workspace sidebar into a community's posts. To go back later, open Communities in your member navigation.

Editing a community

Click any community in the list to edit its name, slug, description and visibility. Save stays disabled until something has actually changed.

Two changes carry consequences and warn you inline:

• Changing the slug breaks every existing link to the community. Old links do not redirect -- anyone following a bookmark or a previously shared address will get a missing page. If people have the link, treat it as permanent.
• Changing visibility changes whether the community appears in members' Communities lists. Switching to unlisted does not remove anyone who has already joined.

Icon and colour are not on this form. They are set when the community is created.

Deleting a community

The danger zone at the foot of the edit page offers two levels.

Delete community, after an inline confirmation, removes the community from the directory while preserving its posts and memberships. This is the one to reach for if a community has run its course, or if you created it by mistake and people have already posted.

Behind that sits Permanently delete. It asks you to type the community's exact name, then removes the community along with every post, reply, like and membership in it. That cannot be undone.

Both actions return you to the Communities list, and both are recorded in your organization's audit log, as is creating a community.

Who can do what

• Creating a community requires the Core plan or above, and an owner or admin role.
• Editing and deleting an existing community require owner or admin, with no plan requirement.
• Other staff roles may see Communities in the sidebar and even the list itself, but cannot complete any of these actions.

If your organization's community features have been suspended, owners and admins see a banner on the Communities settings page, and creating is unavailable until it is resolved. Members see a notice on their Communities list and on each community, and New post and Follow are unavailable to them while it lasts.

Why this matters

A community is the one place in OrganizeOS where your members talk to each other rather than to you. That makes it worth a little deliberate setup: a clear name and description so people know what the space is for, a considered choice between listed and unlisted so the right people find it, and a slug you are willing to live with, because changing it later quietly breaks every link anyone has saved or shared. Everything after that happens on the member side, where you participate as a member like everyone else.