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What is a community?

A LiveJournal community is a journal where many users post entries about a similar topic. Users who are interested in a particular subject can find or create a community for this subject. For example, residents of a town or city can use a community to exchange local information and announce local events. After you find and join an interesting community, you can post comments or entries to the community.
Several things make communities different from personal journals:
  • Comments and Entries: Comments and entries in a community account are posted by other personal accounts. Community accounts can neither post comments or entries, nor join other communities. If you have email notifications enabled and you post an entry in a community, you will receive notifications for comments posted in reply to that entry. In addition, a maintainer can subscribe to receive notifications whenever a comment is made on any entry in a community with Professional or Permanent package of service.

  • Links: A community has multiple link formats, which include:
    • http://community.livejournal.com/communityname/
    • http://communityname.livejournal.com/

  • LiveJournal Users:

    • Owners: A community's owner supervises the community and has the capability to use all administrative functions available for managing their community. An owner may add additional maintainers or moderators as they see fit.
    • Maintainers: A community always has at least one maintainer and may have multiple maintainers. Maintainers use their own user accounts to supervise a community, control its settings and Community Info, and perform some administrative functions.
    • Moderators: A community will have one or more moderators if a maintainer has turned on moderated posting. Owners and maintainers are usually moderators too. In most communities with moderated posting, a moderator must approve your entries before they are posted.
    • Members: A community typically has at least one member, who has joined the community. Members, not watchers, can see the community's Members-only entries. For Communities with fewer than 500 members, the entire Members list will be displayed on a Community Info page. For communities with more than 500 members, a link to the directory member listing is displayed on both the Community Info page and on ?mode=full pages). Maintainers have access to the full list of members through the Community Management page
    • Watchers: A community typically has at least one watcher, who has friended the community. Watchers, not members, can see the community's entries on their Friends page. Up to 150 watchers (or 5000 watchers on ?mode=full pages) are displayed on a Community Info page.

  • Account with Professional package of service Benefits: Communities and personal journals have different account with Professional package of service benefits. Owner and maintainers of communities with accounts with Professional package of service can send mass mailing to its members.

  • Security: Entries with Private or Custom security cannot be posted in a community. Entries can be posted so that Everyone can see them or just Members.

  • Userpics: Community entries are associated with the poster's userpic. You cannot select from the community's userpics when posting entries, unless you upload some of those userpics to your own account. You can choose whether a community's entries will display on your Friends page with either the community's userpic or the entry's poster's userpic on the Customize Journal Style page.

Last Updated: February 26th, 2021

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