Managing community discussion topics

The community consists of posts associated with different discussion topics. Topics can be anything you want, and you can create as many as you want.

Guide managers can add, edit, delete, and manually arrange topics. Agents don't have the permissions to make these changes. The community is available on Guide Professional and Enterprise.

For information about managing community posts within discussion topics, see Managing community posts. 

Topics covered in this article:

• Adding discussion topics
• Editing and deleting discussion topics
• Reordering discussion topics

Adding discussion topics

Discussion topics can be anything you want. You can add as many topics as you need.

For example, if you support multiple products, you might add a topic for each product. If you have one product with a lot of functionality, you might add a topic for each major feature area or task. If you have different types of users -- end-users and API developers, for example -- you might add a topic for each type of user. You can also add a General Discussion topic where users can discuss issues that don't quite fit in the other topics.

To add a topic

1. Click Add in the top menu bar, then select Community topic.

   

2. Enter a Name and optional Description for your section.
3. Select a User segment to determine who can access this topic.

   By default, a topic is visible to all users. You can chose to restrict access to signed-in users.

   On Guide Professional, you have the option to restrict access to agents and managers to create internal-only access. On Guide Professional, you can also apply custom user segments you've created to further restrict access based on tags, organizations, or groups (see Creating user segments to restrict access).

4. Under Who can manage articles, select Managers if want only Guide Managers to add and edit articles, or leave Agents and managers selected if you want agents to also be able to add and edit articles in this section.
5. Click Add.

Editing and deleting discussion topics

You can edit a discussion topic if you need to change the name, description, or access privileges.

You can delete a topic if you no longer need it. When you delete a topic, all the posts in the topic are also deleted. If you don't want to delete the posts in the topic, you should move the posts before you delete the topic.

To edit a topic

1. Open the topic in Help Center, then click Edit topic in the top menu bar.

   

2. Make your changes to the name or description and click Update.

To delete a topic

1. Open the topic in Help Center, then click Edit topic in the top menu bar.

   Be sure you've moved any posts that you want to save to another topic.

2. Click the Delete topic link on the page.

Reordering discussion topics

You can manually reorder your community discussion topics. You cannot reorder the posts within a topic.

To manually reorder topics

1. In Guide, click the Arrange content () icon in the sidebar, then click Arrange topics.
2. Click any community topic, then drag it to another place in the order.
3. Click Save when you're finished.