We recommend that you create forums within a specific group instead of within the Site Root to ensure that your community members initiate discussions or questions in the appropriate area of your community. Be sure to establish your group structure prior to creating new forums.
You can create a forum through two different paths, via:
- Group Administration under the group where you want the forum to reside.
or
- Forum Administration, which also requires you to specify the group under which the forum resides, but you do not see the context in which you're creating the forum (e.g., you do not know what other applications already exist under the group).
We recommend that you use the first path to create a new forum:
- Navigate to Control Panel Dashboard > System Administration > Group Administration > Groups > Groups.
- Select the group in which you want to add a forum. You may need to click on the icon to the left of the group name to expand a group if you want to add a forum to a subgroup.
- Click Edit. The Group Options page appears.
- Navigate to the Applications tab. Each group, when first created, by default includes one application of each type (blog, forum, wiki, file gallery), unless it is not possible to create one of them under licensing constraints. Each application is named with the group name and its type of application. Review the forums already included within the group to ensure another forum within the group is appropriate for your community.
- To add a forum, click Add Forum. The Create New Forum window appears.
- Specify a unique Forum Name that is shown to all community members who have access to the group.
- Optionally, specify a Description of the forum (which can include HTML) that is displayed in any detailed forum browse list and its forum pages when community members are reading and creating forum posts.
- We recommend that you do not change the group where the forum resides, but you can close the current entry and begin typing another group's name if you want to create the forum in a different group. Telligent Community will find the group name if it exists.
- In Allowed Thread Types, choose the thread type or types that you want this forum to support. If you select both Question & Answer and Discussion, you must also choose which thread type you want to make default in Default new threads to. Telligent Community's default type is Discussion.
- By default, Telligent Community assumes you want the forum to be enabled, but you can set Enable this Forum to No if you want to hide the forum from community members until you have it fully configured and maybe populated with, minimally, an announcement for introduction.
- Choose the Default Language for the forum.
- If you want to set advanced settings such as moderation, indexing, or statistics, click the Advanced tab.
- By default, all posts within the new forum are indexed for search. To disable this, select No for Index Posts.
- By default, all posts within the new forum are not moderated but instead are immediately posted to the forum. You or your forum moderator can still moderate the posts as necessary after they are already posted. To enable moderation, set Moderate Posts to Yes and, if you want to be notified each time a post requires moderation, set Enable Moderate Notifications to Yes.
- By default, each forum post created in this new forum is included in the user's total post count and count toward the user's point total. If this new forum will be used for purposes other than general community content, you may want to set Enable Post Statistics to No to not include this forum's posts in the user's overall post count and/or set Enable Post Points to No to not include posts in the user's total point total.
- Click Save to create the new forum. You are returned to the group options page.
- Navigate to the Applications tab to verify that your new forum was created. (It is listed in the Group Applications list.) You can edit any forum's settings. Navigate to the forum either:
- Through the group (as described above) and click Edit next to that forum.
or
- Via Control Panel > Forums Administration > Forums and Groups > Forums and click Edit next to the forum you want to edit.