Community forum

A community forum is a public Q&A space on your website where members post questions and other members answer them. It runs on reputation: members earn points for taking part, and those points govern what they can do, from asking a question to moderating other people's posts. Accepting an answer marks a question solved. New members with little reputation have their posts held for a moderator to approve before they appear, which keeps spam off the site.

Questions, answers, and comments

These are three different things:

• A question is the post that starts a thread.
• An answer is a full reply that counts toward solving the question. Accepting one marks the question solved and floats it to the top of the thread.
• A comment is side discussion attached to a question or an answer. It does not count as an answer.

How reputation works

Members earn reputation by taking part: asking a question, getting an upvote, and having an answer accepted all add points. Downvotes and removed posts take points away. Reputation gates actions on a rising scale. Asking and answering need a little; upvoting needs more; downvoting needs much more; editing other people's posts, closing questions, and moderating each sit higher still. Acting on your own post always needs less reputation than acting on someone else's. The thresholds are set per forum, so an admin can tune them.

Two consequences are worth knowing:

• Below the "post freely" threshold, a new member's question goes to a moderation queue and shows publicly only after a moderator approves it. This is the usual reason a post you made isn't on the site yet.
• Low-reputation members can't post images or links, and their links carry a nofollow tag until they're trusted.

Voting rules

• You can't vote on your own posts.
• Voting the same way again removes your vote.
• Casting the opposite vote flips it.

Accepting your own answer earns no reputation, so the ranking can't be gamed.

Moderation

• Approve posts waiting in the queue.
• Close a question with a reason: duplicate, off-topic, spam, or offensive. Closing a post as spam or offensive docks the author's reputation; reopening it refunds those points.
• Members with enough reputation can flag a post for a moderator to review.

Set up a forum

1. Turn on the forum app from the Apps page.
2. Create a forum and pick its mode: Q&A (one accepted answer per question) or discussion (an open thread).
3. Set privacy: public, signed-in users only, or a private group.
4. Write a welcome message and a short FAQ for new members.
5. Add starter tags. Members with enough reputation can add their own later.

Badges, ranks, and profiles

Reputation also drives public recognition. Members climb ranks at set reputation thresholds, and you can award badges (bronze, silver, gold) by hand or automatically through challenges. Each member has a public profile page, but visitors see it only when that member is published on the website, which is a per-member switch.

Related

• The forum lives on your site: Website Builder.
• Back to the Website overview.