You can create a new community on the Create New Community page.

Community usernames fall under the same restrictions as journal usernames: numbers, lower-case letters, and underscores. Underscores cannot be at the beginning or end of usernames, and you cannot have a username with more than one underscore in a row.

When you create your community, you will be asked to select various community settings. These include membership, posting, and content settings.

More details on the setting options for communities are available in the Community Management FAQ.

There is a limit on how many communities each personal account can create, to prevent spam and name-hoarding. Currently, each personal account can create three communities per week.

If you're creating a community, we recommend that you do so directly from the Create New Community page.

However, if you've already created a personal account with the name you want for your community, it is possible to change it to a community.

To do this, you will need a separate personal account, under a different username, that will be the administrator for the community. If you don't already have one, you can create one.

You will also need to make sure that the journal you want to turn into a community is empty. If there are any entries in the account, you will need to delete them before you can convert it to a community, and then log back out of that account.

If the journal you want to turn into a community currently administers any other communities, you will need to remove that journal as an admin before it can be successfully converted.

Lastly, make sure you are logged into the account that will be the administrator of the newly converted community, and visit the Convert New Community page and follow the instructions there.

You can manage your community on the Manage Communities page.

The Manage Communities page lists any communities you administer or co-administer in alphabetical order by community username. The various actions that can be taken for each community are listed next to each community name.

Post:

Post an entry to your community

Profile:

Edit your community's profile

Journal Style:

Customize your community's style

Settings:

Adjust posting, joining, and content settings for your community

Invites:

Lists any invites you have sent out to prospective community members in the last 30 days

Members:

Lists current community members and their posting and administrator privileges; lets you invite others to join your community.

On all pages where you can manage the settings of your account, there is a "Work As" drop-down for you to choose communities you administer. To change the settings of your community, select the community name in this drop-down and hit the "Switch" button. The page will re-load with the community's settings, which you can then change.

Your community's settings can be altered at the Manage Communities page.

Community Membership

With open membership, anyone can join your community. With moderated membership, requests to join your community will be submitted to you for approval. With closed membership, no one can join your community unless you invite them.

Non-Member Posting Restrictions

If non-members can post to your community, it is not necessary for them to join your community in order to post to it. If non-members cannot post to your community, they must join your community to post to it.

Member Posting Restrictions

If you would like to restrict posting privileges to specific community members, you can do so. You can specify which members have posting privileges for your community via the Manage Communities page.

Entry Moderation

If entries are unmoderated, they will appear in your community immediately upon posting. If entries are moderated, a community administrator must approve them from the moderation queue before they will appear in the community.

Adult Content

Dreamwidth has two levels of "Adult Content" - "Viewing Discretion Advised" and "Explicit Adult Content." If you set your community to "Viewing Discretion Advised," visitors to your community will be warned that your community should be viewed with appropriate discretion. All users will be able to view this content if they click through the warning. If you set your community to "Explicit Adult Content," only logged-in users over the age of 18 will be able to join your community and view its entries.

A community administrator can make their community members-only by setting a default security level for future posts, or by restricting membership to their community.

Setting the Default Security Level for New Entries

To change the default security level for new entries to a specific community, go to the Privacy tab on the My Account Settings page. In the "Work As" box, select the name of the community you wish to make members-only, then hit the "Switch" button. You can then modify the "Default Entry Security" option to "members." Scroll down and hit "Save" to apply this option.

Previously posted entries will not be affected by this option. Community members will have to change the security level to members-only on posts they have made themselves, or a community administrator can delete the entry.

While community members cannot post public entries directly to a members-only community, they can edit the security level of their already-posted entry to be public. It is not possible to prevent this.

Restricting Membership

It's possible to control who can become a member of your community by setting your community's membership settings to "moderated" or "closed" on the Manage Communities page. If your community has open membership, anyone can join the community and thus gain access to members-only posts at any time.

If you're a community administrator, you can enable a moderation queue for entries posted to your community. With a moderation queue, entries from people who don't have "unmoderated" status will be placed into the moderation queue for a community administrator to approve or reject.

When entries are submitted to the moderation queue, administrators will be notified with a link to the moderation queue, where they can take action on the entry in question. If the administrator chooses to approve an entry, a notification will be sent to the entry poster informing them that their entry was approved, and their entry will appear in the community. If the administrator chooses to reject an entry, they can provide a reason in the rejection form, which will be sent to the entry poster, along with the full text of the original entry. If an entry submission is determined by the community administrator to be spam, there is an option to "reject and mark as spam".

You can enable moderation for your community on the Manage Communities page. Follow the "Settings" link there for the community you wish to modify, then select the "Moderate entries to your community?" option in the section labeled "Posting Access".

You can also control who has access to post entries in your community by adjusting the "member posting" and "non-member posting" settings.

As the community administrator, you can make certain changes to entries posted by a member of your community. These changes are:

Disabling Comments

Community administrators can disable comments to an entry in their community. (Entry authors can then override this setting and re-enable comments if they want.) To do this, click the Edit Entry link () in the entry's action bar. Select the "Disable comments?" checkbox. Then, select the "Save Administrator Override" button to save your changes.

Adult Content Level

Community administrators can set a more restrictive adult content label for a community entry than the poster chose. To do this, click the Edit Entry link () in the entry's action bar. Select the adult content level you would like the community to have. Then, select the "Save Administrator Override" button to save your changes.

Deleting Posts

To delete an entry that was made to your community, click the Edit Entry link () in the entry's action bar. Select the "Delete Entry" button to delete the entry, or the "Delete and Mark as Spam" button if the entry is an unwanted solicitation and you want to report it to the site's antispam team. You will be prompted to confirm that you really want to delete the entry.

Upcoming Changes

Changes a community administrator can't make to a community entry yet include:

• Changing the security level of the entry


• Changing the comment settings of the entry (other than disabling comments)


• Adding a cut tag

These options are planned for the future.

When you create your community, one of the settings you select determines whether membership for your community should be open, moderated, or closed. If you would like to adjust these settings, you can do so at the Manage Communities page. Other settings determine who will have posting access to your community.

Open Membership

If your community has open membership, users can join your community freely.

Moderated Membership

With moderated membership, users cannot join your community freely — they must request membership by attempting to join. You can manage membership requests manually or you can choose to be notified by email when somebody tries to join your community by selecting the appropriate option under "Administrative Options" on the Manage Communities page. To accept or reject pending members, click on the "Pending" link for the appropriate community on the Manage Communities page, then accept or reject each pending member.

Closed Membership

The only way to add members to a community with closed membership is for you to invite them specifically. Users cannot submit a membership request as they would for a community with moderated membership.

Inviting Users to Join Your Community

You can invite users to join your community via the Manage Communities page. Select the "Members" link for the community you wish to invite users to. If your community has more than one page's worth of members, navigate to the last page of members.

At the bottom of your last "Members" page, there are several rows where you can fill in the information and settings for the potential new members you would like to invite. For each potential member, fill in their username under "Account," then select the privileges you would like for them to have (Member, Posting Access, Unmoderated (can post without going through the moderation queue), Moderator (can approve posts from the moderation queue), Administrator). Select "Update settings" when you are finished.

You can view existing invitations for your community on the Manage Communities page via the appropriate "Invitations" link. Should you change your mind about inviting a specific user to your community, you can also cancel their invitation from that page.

Users who have been invited to join a community can respond from the Manage Community Invitations page, either accepting or declining an invitation.

To remove a member from your community and prevent them from being able to rejoin it, you will need to both remove and ban that user.

Removing a User from your Community

As the administrator of a community, you can remove a user from your community by clicking on the "Members" link associated with the community in question on the Manage Communities page, then locating the member in question and removing their membership status (along with any other privileges they may have in your community). Depending on your community's settings, however, this may not be sufficient to prevent the user from rejoining your community.

- If your community has open membership, the user will be able to rejoin your community. To prevent this, you will need to ban them before they rejoin; otherwise, you may have to remove them again.
- If, in addition, your community allows all members to have posting access, the user will regain posting access when they rejoin your community. To prevent this, you will need to ban them.

Banning a User from your Community

To ban a user from your community, go to the Ban and Unban Accounts page, select the community in question from the "Work As" dropdown, and hit "Switch." Enter the name of the user you would like to ban in the "Ban People" box, then scroll down and hit "Ban and Unban Accounts."

If you have previously banned people from your community, a list of those people will display under the "Unban People" header. Should you wish to unban any of these people from your community, you can select their name, then scroll down and hit "Ban and Unban Accounts."

Banning a member from your community will remove their ability to post comments or entries to your community. This will not remove their community membership, though, so they will still be able to see any members-only entries.

Banning a non-member from your community will prevent them from posting comments or entries to your community, and it will prevent them from being able to join your community.

It is also possible to ban a user from your community when deleting a comment from them in that community.

Renaming a community works much like renaming a personal journal does. Any admin of a community can rename it. If you are renaming a community to the username of a personal account you control, the confirmed email address on the community and the confirmed email address on the personal account must be the same. The passwords on both accounts must also be the same.

Like personal account renames, communities can be renamed to any unregistered username, any username that has been deleted and purged (not simply deleted; the page when visiting the account must say that the account has been deleted and purged), and any username you control. Communities can't currently be renamed to a username that's in use by another community, even if you admin that community.

If you choose to rename a community to an account that already exists, the contents of that existing account will be moved to a different, randomly-chosen combination of letters and numbers. You will still have access to that account; if necessary, you can recover lost usernames to get a listing of all accounts you control under that particular confirmed email address, which will give you the name of the account that has been created. You can then delete the account or rename it to something else.

To rename a community, it must have no members, other than yourself the administrator of the community.

To transfer a community to a new admin, go to Manage Communities. For the community you want to transfer, click on "Members".

In the listing of community members, find the account you want to be the new admin of the community. If the community has more than 50 members, type the name in the "Jump to Account" textbox to be taken to the page where that member is listed. Click the checkbox in the "Administrator" column to grant admin privileges to the account.

You can now uncheck the checkbox under "Adminstrator" for your own account to remove yourself as an admin, or leave the community entirely.

You should also remind the new admin to change the community's email address to their own by going to Change Email Address and selecting the community from the "Work As" dropdown.

Like deleting a personal journal, you can delete your community on the the [Unknown item code: /accountstatus.bml.title in domain general] page. Select the community you want to delete in the "Work As" dropdown menu, then set the status to "Deleted".

You can use the same page to undelete your community if you change your mind. You are guaranteed the opportunity to undelete a community for at least 30 days after you delete it. After 30 days, the community may be entirely purged from our servers at any time.

If the community is active, and has members who might be willing to take over the community, you might want to transfer the community to a new admin instead.