Administering communities

1. From the Staff site, go to Community > Communities.
2. Select Add a Community.
3. Define the community using the fields described below, then click Save.
4. Select the community from the Communities list.
5. Click Discussions. Select Add discussion forum to create discussions that the members will need.
6. Click Security. Here you can set the Access Settings for the community, add members to Specific Roles, and define Specific Member Types.
7. Click Participants, then click Add. In the Find window, you can Select a Query to bulk-add members to the community, or search for a single contact to add. Adding members will subscribe them to receive community announcements.

This window defines a community and the graphic that represents the community. From the community page, select Edit.

Click to view image

• Name – Specifies the name of the community that is displayed on the web and in email messages sent to subscribers.
• Community Layout – Specifies the content record for the community, which uses a selected layout.
• Default Website (for notifications) – Specifies the website as defined in RiSE > Site Builder > Manage websites. The website must be published (not in a Working status). This setting indicates the website users will see when clicking a link included in a subscription notification or in a "report this post" message. The default website should be a website that is accessible to all subscribers of the community. Also, do not select the iMIS Desktop View as the default website.
• Graphic – Specifies the image file displayed when readers view the Community on the web.
• Graphic Alt Text – Specifies the alternative text that appears when the image cannot be displayed or when you hover your mouse over the graphic. 
• Short Description – Specifies a short description of the community and its purpose in one or two sentences. No HTML coding or CSS styling is enabled in the short description.
• Long Description – Specifies a longer description of the community and allows HTML coding or CSS styling. This description appears in the side bar on the Community main page. If you find some features of the HTML editor confusing, you can download user documentation for the editor.

• Note: Some features described in this external document have not been enabled for use when defining communities.

  Warning!
  If you use the HTML editor's built-in Image Editor to modify an image that has a transparent background, the transparent background will be replaced by solid black pixels. If you need to edit images that have a transparent background, you should save a copy of the image to your local computer and use your preferred image-editing program to modify it. After you have edited the image locally, upload the new version to iMIS again, overwriting the old version if desired.

• Allow any member to create a wiki – (disabled by default) Permits all authenticated users to create wikis, regardless of their community role.
• Community discussions are moderated – (disabled by default) Forces every discussion on the community to be subject to moderation, which means that community posts cannot publish until a moderator or administrator approves them.

Discussion moderation — keeping a discussion posting in queue until a moderator approves (or rejects) it for publication — is sought by organizations that feel urgency to prevent erroneous, inappropriate, or damaging content from being distributed under their name, so much so that removing such postings and posters after the fact is not good enough. Such organizations are often:

• new to social media and reluctant to host discussions at all
• in health care, for which misinformation incurs liability
• involved in industry arbitration, where disgruntled individuals seek to hijack channels for their own ends

Best practices: Controlling discussion postings

Whenever possible, decide against controlling discussion postings on the front end. Enabling this approval workflow creates extra work for moderators, and members experience frustrating delays in seeing their postings broadcast and in getting input or help they may be seeking.

Are you without any control, then? Not at all:

• Be sure to post discussion use policies that make clear your rules for content and behavior as well as the consequences for violation (such as two warnings and then permanent removal from the community).
• Direct your moderators to post warnings, delete inappropriate postings, and have offenders removed from the community, according to your policies. This goes far to covering your accountability.

To enable discussion moderation

If your organization cannot allow any inappropriate postings to ever get through to members and subscribers, even temporarily, you can enable moderation on your discussions. This moderation prevents postings from appearing until a discussion moderator approves it.

Note: Discussion moderation is community-wide: either all discussions are moderated, or none.

1. From the Staff site, go to Community > Communities.
2. Select the Community you want to moderate.
3. Select Edit.
4. Enable Community forums are moderated, then click Save.
5. Click Security, then navigate to the Community Moderators tab.
6. Use the search to find a user. Click Add to assign the user as a community moderator.

1. Log on as a member of the SysAdmin security role.
2. Open the community from the Communities list.
3. Click Security.
4. Click the Access Settings tab.
5. Select Make this available to, and then click the Specific Users drop-down arrow.
6. Select Add user.
7. Find the user and click OK to add the member to the community.

1. Log on as a member of the SysAdmin security role.
2. Open the community from the Communities list.
3. Click Security.
4. Click the Community Administrators tab.
5. Find the user.
6. Click Add to add a person as a community administrator.

Contact records are members of unsecured communities even if they have subscribed to only one discussion or to nothing at all in the community. However, when you add a contact to the Community Participants, you automatically make them subscribers to all updates from the community.

1. On the Community page, click Participants.
2. Click Add.
3. To find a contact, Select a Query, or search, then click Find.
4. Select a name from the list or click the checkbox in the far left column to select all names in the page.
5. Click OK to add the selected members to the Community Participant list.

All added members are subscribed to the community for notifications and participant list displays all the new additions.

• You gain multi-selection capability when you click Participants in the left-hand navigation. When subscribing people, you select one record at a time.
• You may want to modify the search query used to generate the list of results when adding contacts, so that you can select all members of a committee, or all constituents in a State or Province, for example.
• What users see may be modified by their privileges in the Access Settings for the Community. Refer to Preconfigured security sets, for object-level access for information about preconfigured security sets. For example, you can choose one of the Authenticated Users security sets to require people to logon to the website before using a community.
• There are three types of community membership: member, subscriber, and administrator.
  • A member has access to the community, but might not be subscribed to any notifications.
  • A subscriber receives notifications and appears on the Community Participant List.
  • An administrator has access to the community, gets notifications when someone reports a post or comment, and can delete posts or comments.

1. From the Staff site, go to Community > Communities.
2. Select your Community.
3. On the community Home page, locate the Community Participant List and look for your name.
4. If you do not appear as a Moderator or Administrator, have an administrator change your community role (under Security) so that you can proceed.

Moderators can see which members are subscribing to a given discussion. Seeing this list of participants allows moderators to evaluate the constituency (are these our experienced members or our newer ones? are any experts subscribed and contributing to the discussion?) and the success of the discussion (should I take action to get other members subscribed?). Monitoring discussion subscriptions helps you understand which topics are of most interest to members and where changes might be needed.

1. Open the discussion you are interested in by clicking on its title.
2. Locate the Subscribers box under the Recent Posts (usually at right).
3. Seeing the subscribers to a discussion in real time gives you valuable management information, but you can do more with those subscriber lists. Use the export commands (Word, Excel, Acrobat PDF, CSV data) as needed to capture the subscriber information for other uses:
   • Snapshot the subscriber information over time, for activity analysis by community administrators
   • Timestamp the export files, for easy management and future reference
   • Share your archives of subscriber data, to help you hand off duties to the new volunteer discussion moderator
   • Export the subscriber data for quick mail merges, badge printing, or other service tasks by Public users

As a community moderator, you are a gatekeeper who approves (or rejects) discussion posts before they ever show up on the discussion.

1. Study the content standards and the action policies of your community, which should specify what content should not be allowed to post and what to do about it.

Note: Tip: Policies are critical; fights over moderation can poison discussions. If these policies aren't already published on the community for the members to follow, insist that your community administrators do so, to avoid future conflicts.

2. Subscribe to every discussion so that you get email notifications about new content publications.
3. When you get an email that a posting was published, click through the link in the email, log on, and view the discussion.
4. Since new postings can trigger quick responses, scan for new replies.
5. When you find a posting needing approval, open it and scan the body of the posting for inappropriate content (according to your community's policies).
6. Select either approve or decline as appropriate.
7. While you are logged in, open any additional discussions you moderate.

Note: Select Home at left, and scan the summary view of the discussions for topics that are awaiting approval, and tend to those.

1. Log on as an administrator.
2. Open the target community and click Security.
3. Click the Community Moderators tab.
4. Use the Select a query drop-down to find members (only those not subscribed to the community).
5. Select Add for each member who is joining the moderator role.
6. Repeat on the Community Wiki Authors tab, as needed. 

To limit authoring privileges on a wiki to a select group in your organization, you must

• edit the wiki and enable Restrict authoring to Wiki Authors
• add Wiki Authors to your community security (or else only administrators can change the wiki)

To prevent posts from appearing on discussions until they are approved, you must

• edit the community and enable Community discussions are moderated
• add Moderators to your community security (or else only administrators can approve posts)

See Enabling discussion moderation for best practices.

1. When you receive an email indicating someone has reported a post or comment, read the content (which is copied into the email) for inappropriateness.
2. If the content seems inappropriate, click the link to go to it on the website, which opens in your default web browser.
3. Click the edit link on the post and remove the offending portion, or click the delete link to remove the post entirely.

Note: If you cannot see the edit and delete links, make sure that you are logged on as an administrator.

4. Confirm by clicking OK on the resulting dialog box.
5. If you deleted a post erroneously, contact an iMIS SysAdmin have it restored.

You can restore deleted posts by reverting them in the Document system. Be aware that reverting a post reverts only the selected post; any comments on the post must be individually selected and reverted if you want to also revert comments on a deleted post.

1. Logged in as a SysAdmin, go to RiSE > Document system.
2. Click the Recycle Bin, and then select the post you want to restore.
3. Click Versions.
4. Select the post version that you want to restore.

Note: If you see an error, the reported post might have been deleted by another administrator.

5. Click Revert.
6. Confirm by clicking OK.

The following information can be helpful when managing document libraries.

• You create resource libraries or document attachment collections when you want to gather resources into one location for the community to have access to. Anyone can download files from the Resource Library but only administrators can use the Organize, New, Edit, and Versions menus.
• You can upload the configured file types to a document library as described in Managing attachments and uploads.
• A document library may contain policies, meeting minutes, or any document that does not fit a discussion, blog, or wiki content model.
• You can view the Description by selecting the file and then clicking Organize > Properties.

• If people have trouble uploading files, check both the file type and the maximum file size. If you need to adjust the maximum file size limit, refer to Managing attachments and uploads for more information.
• Users working in the resource library on an iPhone, iPad, or Android cannot Download files. They can, however, Preview files on their devices.