Learn how to manage your communities with ASC Console
The Community tab serves as a central hub that allows you to manage all communities within your network. Here, you'll be able to easily create a new community, manage community permissions and memberships, and moderate community content such as posts and comments.
Under the Community tab, you will find two pages - Categories and Communities.
The Categories page gives you an overview of all the categories created and which communities the categories are tagged to. Here, you can also create new categories and edit existing ones.
Categories essentially act like classifications, allowing you to tag communities that fall under the same interest area. For example, if you have 5 fitness-related communities, you can create a "Fitness" category and tag those communities under "Fitness". Tagging communities with a category enables your end users to explore other communities within the same interest area.
Read more about creating & managing categories here.
The Communities page gives you an overview of all communities that have been created in your network, including communities that have been deleted. To manage a community, simply select the community you want to manage, and you'll be able to manage the community's activity, memberships, and settings & permissions. You can also create a new community by selecting the "+" button on the top right.
To easily identify communities that require moderation, simply select the flag icon to filter a list of communities that contain flagged content.
Once you've selected a community, select the "Activity" tab to view and manage all posts and comments that have been created in the community. Here, you can also schedule posts to be published, and approve or decline pending posts that require approval before it is posted onto the community's feed.
If a post has been flagged by community members, it will show you the number of times the post has been flagged; and whether the post has any reported comments. The actual content, image, and videos posted by users will be displayed here, even if the post was soft-deleted. This allows you to review flagged posts. You can then choose to either clear the flags of the posts and comments, or delete the post altogether.
To see the community's member list, select the "Members" tab.
You'll be able to see a list of current community members, including users who have been community-banned or deleted. You can use the search feature to search for members by their user ID or display name, or filter to show only banned members. Banned and deleted users will have an icon displayed next to their User ID indicating their status.
Currently, the following community management functionalities are available on ASC Console:
Adding a member to the community
Changing an existing member's role in the community to another default role (either member, or moderator)
Community banning or unbanning a user
If you want to change any of the settings and permissions of a community that was created, simply go to the 'Permissions' tab and 'Settings' tab.
Under 'Permissions', you'll be able to configure the community's posting permissions.
If your community is a community that's mainly for important announcements, you can set permissions to enable "Only admins can post". This means that community members who are not moderators will not be able to create a post in the community. Read more about roles & privileges here.
If you'd like to allow members to contribute, but would like to review their posts first, you can enable "Approve member posts". When this setting is enabled, all posts created will need to be approved or declined by any moderator of the community. Only approved posts will be published in the community feed.
Do note that you can't enable both of these post settings at the same time. If both of these settings are disabled, it means that all members of the community will be able to post freely in the community feed.
Changed your mind about making the community private? Made a typo when creating the community?
If you want to update any of the settings that were configured when a community was created, go to the "Settings" tab.
You'll be able to:
Remove or upload a new community avatar
Update the community's name
Remove or update a community's description
Change the community's category
Mark community as an official community
Mark community as public or private
You can also close a community, although we'd recommend that this should be an intentional decision as you won't be able to restore a deleted community.
