What are Discussions?

AdvocateHub Discussions is a great place to foster a community. It's another avenue for you to engage with your advocates through conversations, and they'll be able to connect with each other as well.

Once enabled, your Discussions Community can be found in your administrator's toolbar for Discussions . From this dropdown, you can choose to:

• Open Discussions in a new tab by clicking “ View ”, this will direct you to your Hub's Homepage in Advocate view.
• Edit your categories using “ Category Management ”
• Modify some global settings through “ Settings ”.

From the Homepage Discussions view, you can create, edit and delete Discussions posts, respond to posts, comment on replies, and like topics and replies. Essentially, from here, you can manage the content of your Discussions posts.

Creating / Editing Discussions Categories

Next is the Category Management. This page is where you can create a new Discussion Categories and edit the targeting/visibility of the categories. This page will also list all the published Discussions categories that are available in the Hub, the targeted users and how many Discussions topics live in the specific Categories.

Creating a new Discussion Category

To add a new Category, simply click on the + Add Category button. Then you will be brought to the window below. Under the Details Tab , you will be able to customize the behaviour and appearance of your category. The Discussions Topics will live within these Categories.

Category Name

The N ame you enter for your Category will be how it is displayed in both the topic list page and the category list page. Changing the rank will affect the ordering of your Categories in the Discussions Category page. As with Challenges, setting it to 1 will push it to the top.

Default View

Default View can either be “Latest” or “Top”. “Latest” will always list the topics in reverse-chronological order, always pushing topics with the latest activity to the top. “Top” will allow you to choose which attribute to sort by using the “Sort ‘Top’ View By” and choosing whether ascending or descending.

Moderator Approval

Require moderator approval of all new topics or replies can be turned on for any new topics and or new replies in the category. Any unapproved topics and posts will appear in the Moderation screen (Discussions > Moderation). Click on Approve Post to post and make it visible.

Mark Reply as Solution (Learn more here: Discussions: Solved Answer and Voting )

Allow admins and topic authors to mark a reply as the solution is very useful for Q & A or support-type questions, allowing authors to pose a question and marking a reply to their post as a solution.

Add voting options (Learn more here: Discussions: Solved Answer and Voting )

Allow users to vote on topics in this category turns on the voting buttons on topics. Users are only allowed to vote once per topic. They cannot “downvote” or “vote down”, but can rescind any votes given.

Discussion Category Targeting Tab

Once done, head over to the Targeting tab and set up the targeting rules to include the appropriate users.

• If it is a Private Category (default), the Category will only be visible to members of your hub or as per the targeting rules you set up.
• If this Category is Public, it will be available publicly on the web. This means that any content made public will be searchable on and accessible from search engines. Additionally, any user who obtains a link to the customer’s AdvocateHub will also see the publicly available Discussions Categories. Non-members will have read-only access, however, they must sign up to participate. More on Public Discussions can be found in the following article: Public Content and Discussions .

Targeting Rules

In the same way that you can segment challenges and groups, you may segment your Discussion's category. The interface is identical to that of the challenge targeting interface, but if you would like more information about targeting and all the options available to you, see Challenge Targeting Overview and go to the Membership Rules section.

Once you're happy with the set-up, click Save to save your new category and the following notification will appear.

Topic Category Description

Adding a description to a newly created Discussions Category will help users decide which category they want to participate in. To update the Discussions Category description, head over to the Category and click the About Topic.

Inside the About topic, there are instructions to guide you on writing the description of the Discussion Category:

Editing a Discussion Category Setup

To Edit a Category, go back to the Category Management page and click on the ellipsis (... symbol) next to the category that you would like to make changes to. Then a drop down menu with Edit and Delete will appear. Click on Delete if you would like to remove the Category. Otherwise, click on Edit to change the title of the Category or the targeting.

Discussions Settings

In the Settings page, you can customize your Discussions further by changing things like the minimum characters required for the first post, minimum characters required per reply, maximum likes per day, and the default time frame for the “Top” topics list.

The Watched Words section under Logs will allow you to choose which words can trigger approval, be flagged, be censored, or block the post altogether.

Blocked Words

When a member uses a Blocked Word , a pop-up will appear alerting the member of the blocked word and will prevent the advocate from posting their topic or topic reply until the blocked word is removed. In the example below, the Blocked Word was "naughty".

Censored Words

When a member uses a C ensored Word , the word will be censored in their post. In the example below, each letter of the censored word appears as a solid block:

Flagged Words

When a member uses a Flagged Word or has their post manually flagged, a red notification representing the number of times that the post was flagged will appear next to the flag icon at the bottom of the post.

To take action on the flagged post, click on the highlighted number beside the flag. This will take you to the below page to review the flagged post with the option to act on the flag.

For each flagged post, you can choose to take action on the flagged post.

Agree : You agree with the flag and take any of the below actions against the post/user.

• Disagree : You disagree with the flag and remove the flag from the post.
• Ignore : You ignore the flag. The post remains intact but is still marked as flagged.
• Delete : Delete the Post and take any of the below actions against the post.