FAQ - Community Management

You can create a community at the Create New Community page. As the new community's owner, why not review your community's settings at the Manage Communities page? If you want information on the various options available to you, check out the rest of the FAQs in the Community Management category.

During community creation, you choose various membership and posting settings, which you can change later by clicking the Settings link next to the community's name on the Manage Communities page. (Do you want to change community comment settings?)

When you create a community, you decide whether membership will be closed, moderated, or open, and whether all members will have posting access. If you change your mind about your community's settings, you can edit them at the Community Management page. You may also want to invite users to your new community.

If you are the community's owner or a maintainer, you can remove, ban, or unban a member from a community.

If you no longer want to be the owner of one of your communities, you have two options. You can either transfer ownership of the community to another user or delete the community. It is not possible to convert a community to a personal journal.

If you no longer wish to be a member of a community, you may leave that community. If you no longer wish to maintain a community, you will need to ask the community owner to remove your maintainership.

If you no longer want a community, you will need to appoint a new owner. Once you have determined who the new owner of your community will be:

Moderated communities are designed to stop off-topic or abusive community entries. A moderator must approve an entry before it is posted to a moderated community; the moderator can also reject the entry, which prevents it from being posted. Moderation is one of the possible membership and posting settings for your new community.

Community maintainers have the ability to report an entry as "spam" upon deleting it, by selecting "Delete and Mark As Spam" rather than "Delete Journal Entry". If you are not the maintainer of the community, you should contact him or her to do this for you. Community moderators also have the ability to report an entry as "spam" when the entry is in the moderation queue. They can do this by selecting the "Reject and mark as spam" button when viewing the entry in the queue and then confirming this choice.

If a situation in a community requires intervention, you should first attempt to contact a maintainer or the owner of that community. The community's profile lists the maintainers' and owner's usernames; you can also post to the community and request that a maintainer or owner contact you.

A LiveJournal community is "owned" by the community owner. In most cases, this is the user who created the community or its current sole maintainer. For communities created prior to February 2011, the community owner may be another individual, as explained below. All communities must have an owner, and a community owner has all the same abilities as a community maintainer, plus:

• the ability to remove maintainers;
• the ability to rename the community.

It is possible for the community's owner or maintainer to set a minimum security level for all future posts and restrict membership to the community, to create a community viewable only by its members.

You may want to change the security settings of your personal journal instead.

Other users may find your community by searching the Community Directory, through Interest Searches, or several other ways. To increase the chances that your community is found by users who may be interested in becoming members there are several things you, as the community owner or maintainer, can do.

A maintainer is a personal account that has administrative control over a community. A community must always have at least one maintainer (when a community only has one maintainer, that user is also the community's owner). Maintainers have the ability to change most of the community's settings and control community membership, as explained below.

A moderator is a personal account that can manage entries in a community's moderation queue, approve or deny membership requests, and manage comments to community entries.

If you are the community owner or a community maintainer, you can add maintainers in your community. If you are a community owner, you can also remove maintainers. To do so:

1. Go to the Community Management page and click the Members link for the community.


2. To add a new maintainer, select the checkbox next to the new maintainer's username in the "Maintainer" column, as shown here:
   
   
   
   Deselecting this box will remove the user as maintainer.


3. Click Update Settings.

Please note, effective February 2011, community maintainers can no longer remove other maintainers from the community.

Owners and maintainers of communities with Professional and Permanent package of service can send a plain-text email to all members of the community up to once per day. To send a community email click on the Community Email link next to the community name on the Manage Communities page, fill out the Subject and Message Text boxes, and click send.