Structure your community

A forum is only as good as its structure. This guide covers the building blocks and how to arrange them. You do all of this from the management area (open it from your account menu after logging in as an administrator).

The hierarchy

InfoEmu forums have three levels:

• Category — a heading that groups related boards (e.g. Announcements, Community, Support). Categories are organisational only; you don’t post in them directly.
• Forum (board) — where topics live (e.g. General, Feature requests).
• Topic — a single thread, containing posts.

Create and arrange categories and forums

1. Go to Forums in the management area.
2. Add a category for each broad area of your community.
3. Add a forum inside a category. For each forum you can set:
   • Title and description.
   • Moderators — members who can manage content in this forum.
   • Permissions — whether the forum is public or restricted (see below).
   • Parent category.

Keep it lean at launch — a handful of forums that are each obviously the right place to post beats a sprawling tree of empty boards. You can always split a busy forum later.

External-link forums

A forum can be a link to somewhere else instead of a board. Use this to point members at a chat, a status page, or another site from within your forum’s navigation.

Restrict a forum to certain members

Make a forum private by giving access only to specific groups. Members who aren’t in an allowed group won’t see it, and anonymous visitors are sent to log in. Use this for staff areas, paid tiers, or a moderators’ back room. See Members, groups & permissions for how groups work, and Fine-grained access control for rule-based access.

Topic types

When members start a topic they can pick a type, which changes how the topic behaves and looks:

• General — a normal discussion thread.
• Question — a Q&A thread where the author (or a moderator) can mark a post as the answer.
• Article — a longer-form, article-style layout.
• Suggestion — an idea members can vote on. Forums can be set to force the Suggestion type so the whole board behaves like an idea board.

Reactions and post templates

Two admin-curated features help set the tone:

• Reactions — under Reactions in the management area, define the set of emoji reactions members can leave on posts.
• Post templates — under Post templates, create reusable post bodies (grouped into categories) for canned answers or a consistent new-topic format.

Next steps

• Members, groups & permissions
• Moderate your community
• Customize your theme