Crowdicity communities can either be Open (public) or Closed (Private). Administrators choose whether their community is public or private in the Community Settings area of the Crowd Management menu.
Whether a community is Open (public) or Closed (private) will affect who can access the community, and a number of other settings related to access and sharing.
In this article:
Understanding the difference between open and closed communities
Changing your community access settings
Understanding the difference between open (public) and closed (private) communities
This table outlines the key questions that you may have about who can access your community:
Question
| Open (public)
| Closed (private)
|
Is my community visible to people who don't sign in?
| Yes, users will be able to view the content in your community, including challenges. They must register an account to post an idea, comment or vote.
| No, only those users that sign in can see any of the content in your community.
|
Can anybody log in to the community?
| Yes, there are no restrictions on who can create a user account for your community
| No. Only people that you invite or give permissions to create an account can log into your community. Anyone can enter their email to register and then request to join the community, at which point an email will be sent to the administrator/s of the community to approve or deny this request.
|
Will people find my community on Google?
| Yes. If you want, you can make it easier for search engines (eg Google) to find your community by adding a metadata description to your pages and your community. You can add meta data to a page when you are editing it using the pages CMS area.
| It is possible that a Google search may bring up the log in page for your community, but people will only be able to see the contents of your community if they log in. We don't prevent Crowdicity communities from being indexed by search engines, but if you don't enter any metadata on your pages it is very unlikely that a search engine will display your community as the result of a search.
|
Social media options in open and closed communities
Whether your community is Open (public) or Closed (private) has an effect on social media settings.
If your community is Open you can allow users to share ideas or challenges in your community to their social media profiles (eg Facebook, Twitter, etc). Allowing and encouraging social sharing is a great way to spread the word about your community.
If your community is closed, you cannot allow social sharing, but it is possible to allow users to authenticate their log in using a social media profile. In any community, you can Enable the option to add a Social log in to your community. This means that users can use their social media log in to create an account for your community.
If the community is closed, users can create an account, but if they are not using an email address that you have authorised or invited in to your community, they will be shown a message explaining that they do not have permission to access your community. If this happens, an email will be sent to the community administrators asking them to approve or deny the user's request to log into the community.
Changing your community access settings
You can make your community Open (public) or Closed (private) in the community settings area of the Crowd Management menu:
1. Click on ' Community settings' in the Crowd Management menu
2. Go to the ' Access and Privacy' tab of Community settings. The first option on this page is Community access, where you can select whether your community is Open or Closed
3. Select the option that you would like and click Save changes at the bottom of the page