Community Creation Walkthrough

[referees]

Modified from this post written by tawnyport.

Making Your Community
Privatizing Your Community
Adding Members To Your Community

Making Your Community

• It is critical that you, the Team Captain, are the only person to complete this step since you will be the community administrator once you create it. That being said, creating a community is as easy as making a journal.


• You must be logged in to the journal you wish to use as the administrator in order to create the community.


• Once you are logged in, go to the drop down menu on the left under "Create." At the bottom, you will see an option to create a community:
  
  


• Select a name for your team and a way to describe it. Be as creative as you want but remember, all your team members will see this information so keep it team friendly and safe-for-work:
  
  



• As long as the username isn't taken, you should be able to continue. The following are recommended settings for your community. This will allow you to control the membership and make sure only your team's members can access your community. The radio buttons should look as follows:
  
  
  
  



• Congratulations, you are now the owner of your team's brand new community. From here you can handle any cosmetic changes you'd like to make (again, be considerate to your team members when making the community: small white text on a black background is hard on the eyes).



• You may also find it useful to make a "sticky" post that stays at the top of your community, and keep it updated with important team links and goings-on. You can see an example of this at the top of the Main SASO Comm. To make a sticky post, just follow the instructions on this page.

Privatizing Your Community

• There is one more very important step you should complete, however. This is not mandatory but highly recommended for the privacy of your team's work.


• Go into your community's account settings. You want to make sure you are working as your community so make sure the username for the community is chosen:
  

From here, go to the privacy tab and look for the dropdown box that allows you to pick the privacy of new entries to the community. It is recommended that you set it to "Members Only," as this will mean only verified team members can see the entries:



• This will keep curious rivals from peeking at their competition. Since we trust the members of this competition to behave with integrity, we're not overly concerned about cheating, which is why this is not mandatory but is, again, strongly recommended just for your peace of mind.

Adding Members To Your Community

• Once your community is created, you will be responsible for organizing your membership. There are two ways for you to assemble your team members. The first is to approve any membership requests that come from your teammates. This is accomplished by going to the community management page, found under the "Organize" option from your profile:
  
  


• From there, look for the link that indicates how many pending invites you have, click through and approve any usernames that belong to members of your team:
  
  
  
  


• The other method is by inviting your team to the community. Again, to go the community management page, this time clicking on "Invitations." From there, enter the usernames of the people you wish to invite to your community (as seen on the team roster):
  
  


• Team members will then be responsible for accepting invites.


• Between these two methods, your team community should soon be thriving and ready for team mingling!

If you have any questions or comments, just leave a comment here and we'll try to sort you out. :)