Admin Guide: Getting Started

Questions
1

:wave: Welcome to your new community and thank you for choosing Discourse!

:sun_behind_small_cloud: Overview

Discourse is a powerful and flexible platform with many options for customization that you’ll want to explore over time.

To get started, we recommend you comoplete the following steps:

:bulb: If you need to get back here later, scroll to the top of any page and click the Getting started button.

:magic_wand: Complete the setup wizard

You’ve already been through the setup wizard, but if you skipped some steps, you can go back now and update some basic settings at this link: /wizard.

:handshake: Invite a few people to join you

It’s helpful to collaborate with at least one or two other people early that can provide feedback on the decisions you’re making about your community.

  • If your community allows people to freely sign up, send them the link and ask them to join.
  • If your community is invite only, go to your invites page and look for the + Invite button to create invite links you can share or directly email everyone you want to have in your community.

:bulb: Your community starts off in “bootstrap mode”, which gives early members a higher level of trust than the typical new member so they can help you launch your community. You can adjust how long your community remains in bootstrap mode here. For more information about bootstrap mode, see the Discourse Meta documentation.

:thought_balloon: Discuss ideas with your community

Now that you have a few collaborators, you can start trying things out together and discussing ideas for your community.

To start a new discussion, click the + New Topic button on the latest topics page or within any of the following categories.

  • #Site Feedback is for discussions about your site, how it works, and how you can improve it. It’s designed to be open to participation by everyone who can access your community.

  • #General is for topics of general interest to your community. You can create additional categories as you decide how you want to make space for different kinds of topics.

  • #Staff is only visible to admins and moderators and can be used for topics you wish to discuss privately with other admins and moderators.

    If you’d like to promote any members to become admins or moderators, visit their user page and click on the :wrench: Admin button, then click Grant Admin or Grant Moderator.

:bulb: You can use chat for faster paced discussions.

:wave: Update your welcome topic and guidelines

Update the welcome topic in the #General category and the community guidelines on your FAQ page as you see fit. Go through it yourself with your initial members and see if there’s anything you want to add or change.

To get you started, think about what you want new members to know about your community or do when they first join.

:art: Adjust other customizations

To customize the look and feel of your community beyond what you configured in the setup wizard, you can change the following settings in the admin section:

:speaking_head: Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at team@discourse.org with any questions or feedback you have along the way.

Additional options

Discourse is very configurable and there is a great deal more people can do to customize it, integrate it into other platforms, or address any use case. Users going down this route are highly encouraged to join meta.discourse.org, our support community, to learn from what others have and to give and get advice.

Available on all plans:

Available on the Standard plan and up:

Available on the Business plan:

:arrows_clockwise: Repeat!

While you’re getting started, you may find it helpful to repeat the steps above a few times. Invite a few more people, discuss ideas with them, and make adjustments to your site based on their input and feedback.

After one or two rounds, you should have a good sense of what kind of experience people have as they join your community and be ready to invite a wider audience.

:rocket: Launch your community

Once you feel like things are in a good place to invite a wider audience, launch your community:

  • Publicize your site where you expect to find interested members
  • Invite more members
  • Help new members find ways to participate

You can continue to improve your community as you receive feedback from you members.

:books: Learn more

Here are some additional resources from our blog and our own community that you may also want to explore.

:speaking_head: Again, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at team@discourse.org with any questions or feedback you have along the way. We’re here to help!