Zendesk Gather is a community forum solution that expands and improves support by empowering customers to connect and collaborate with one another. Gather empowers teams to solicit the help they need from an active and engaged community, creating a channel to harness customers’ expertise, aggregate best practices, and promote feedback.
Gather complements the knowledge base in your Help Center. You must have Guide before you can use Gather to set up your community. See Getting started with Guide for more information on setting up Guide.
This article covers the following topics:
About the community structure
The community is where you can create and comment on posts to pose questions, provide answers, or share ideas.
Posts are associated with discussion topics.
Community posts can include ideas, tips, or any other community items. Answers can include observations, clarifications, praise, or any other response that's part of a typical community discussion.
Setting up the community
If you do not have a live Help Center, but are working on your Help Center in setup mode, the community is activated by default in setup mode. You can set up and test your community at the same time as the rest of your Help Center and then activate the Help Center when you're ready.
If you already have a live Help Center, and you are adding a community, the community is not activated by default. You need to activate it to work with the content. If you do not want the community to be visible to end users while you are setting it up, you need to remove the links to your community in your theme.
Set up the community
- Think about how to make the community successful. See Best practices: Six things to think about before setting up a community.
- Create community discussion topics. See Adding discussion topics.
- Consider seeding your discussion topics with posts. See Making posts in the community.
- Understand how to manage the community that you are creating. See Managing community discussion topics and Managing community posts.
- Think about other community features that might be useful to your organization, for example, community moderators. See Creating community moderator groups.
When you have your community set up, you're ready to view and test it.
Viewing and testing your community
If you don't have a live Help Center, and you are working on your Help Center in setup mode, you can use either of these options to view and test the content in your community.
- Use the community directly to view and test your content (managing community topics).
- Use the Themes page in Guide to work with your content (see previewing your Help Center theme).
If you have a live Help Center, and you are adding a community, follow these steps to view and test your community.
- Activate your community.
- Hide your community links using the Themes page in the Customize design (
) page in Guide (see customizing your Help Center theme). - Use the community directly to view and test your content (managing community topics).
After you've finished testing, remember to remove any content that you don't want to be visible to customers.
Activating the community
To activate the community
- In Guide, click the Settings (
) icon in the sidebar, then select Gather settings. - Select Activate community.
- Click Save.
The community is now live to end users in your Help Center. You can disable the community by deselecting the Activate community check box.
30 Comments
Can you explain what is the difference between the community section on Guide we have been using for quite some time, and Gather? What are the functionality differences, or is Gather just a rebranding exercise? If the latter, any new features?
Hi James,
If you're an existing Guide customer with Community, you are on the Gather Legacy plan. That includes the existing functionality, plus aliases and @mentions. Gather Professional will add community functionality going forward so you can upgrade if you want to receive any new features.
This articles has the details: About Gather plan types
Jennifer Rowe How does one activate Gather on the Legacy Plan if one is already on it? Is it just the current Guide process with the Gather upgrades?
Hi Mark Menjivar! I'm not sure I understand your question, but I'll try to answer!
If you were a Guide professional or enterprise customer with an active community, then you were automatically put on the Gather Legacy plan. You should see Gather settings under your Guide settings, with the Activate Community setting enabled.
If you were a Guide customer but did not have an active community, you were not placed on Gather Legacy.
Hope that helps! If not, then let us know and one of our community managers might be able to help!
So are the @mentions available now in our community? If so, How do you hide the email address from appearing in the post?
Hi Mary Paez!
The @mentions feature will be rolled out to all existing Guide accounts with community by the end of October, so I'm not sure if your account has it yet.
You should not see the users email address in the post, only their name. And the name links to their profile.
Hope that helps!
Thank you
It appears from this article that you can set up topics in Gather before activation.
When I log in as Guide Admin, and go to Gather, the only option I have is to activate.
Do I have to activate before Adding Discussion Topics?
Thanks.
Hi Dennis Schmidt
You have to activate the community before you can arrange topics, yes.
Potential workaround: There is an option (in Guide settings) to Deactivate the Help Center itself which makes it available to only admins. That way you can stage your Help Center before publishing anything.
But saying that, I also realize that this is not an option if you're already using the Help Center though, and in that case our ability to have you easily stage the community is currently limited. You can remove the links to the community in your theme, and that would allow you to stage the community without anyone noticing.
I will make sure that the issue here is recorded in our backlog and we'll be looking more into it soon. But I can't give you a timeline for a fix right now.
Dennis Schmidt, I've updated the article to reflect Kasper's comments. Sorry about that!
Looks like the previously free version of Communities (such as the one used in the sandbox) has been replaced by a trial option - which suggests a cost long term where previously there was not.
Yet another nail in the coffin of having a "representative" Sandbox experience, without having to effectively pay twice! Disappointing.
Hi Chris Tout,
Actually this is not intended as a way to make you pay twice. Not at all. The sandbox accounts have not been grandfathered into Gather, but if you reset your sandbox, it will copy over your new subscription settings and then you will have it again!
Hi Kasper,
Thanks for the information. So to ensure the sandbox is representative of features in the "live" instance, frequent sandbox resets are recommended?
Chris Tout glad I could help. I don't know if it's a general recommendation to reset sandboxes frequently. It's not so frequent that we launch new products and subscription types, but if we do, a sandbox reset like this is needed.
Hi Dennis Schmidt,
We have some more news on how to stage a community before you activate it.
You can work with your community from the Themes page, even if the community is disabled. I’ve added some instructions to the article explaining how to do this: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034794013#topic_gdj_pqz_
Will Gather facilitate gamification, badges, and other standard community forum features without custom code?
Hi Aswin -
Gather facilitates a number of standard community forum features including voting, @ mentions, the ability to mark the status of threads, and community moderator functionality.
There are not currently out of the box functions related to gamification or badging, however these sorts of features are high priority for the product team and something they are looking into adding. We do not have specifics on roadmap or ETA that we can share at this time, but improvements and additions will continue to be made to the Gather platform.
Is there an API for Gather where I could GET/POST alias for users? We need to provide users with alias and then let them opt out of using an alias.
Hey Tim,
We have our Help Center API documentation which I've linked for you here: Help Center API
We don't have a dedicated Gather API currently but this is something our Product Managers is currently looking into.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
The Community in our Help Center is already active, for years now. If I deselect the box to make it inactive, will I lose anything? Could I reactivate it later and everything will return as it was before deactivating? Thanks for the help!
Hi Monica,
I did a small test with just a few topics and posts in a sandbox environment. I turned it off and then back on and the topics and posts that were there previously were retained.
Thanks!
Maggie
Hi Everyone,
Just want to ask if what package that's suited to our business needs.
The following list is what we want to implement on our website and zendesk.
1.) Chat bot
2.) Live support/chat conversation with leads
3.) Mailchimp integration so all leads go into mailchimp audience
Thanks!
Chuchay
Hi Chuchay -
You'll need to speak with someone in our sales department to get that answered; they know the details of all of the plans that can enable what you're looking for. You can reach them here: https://www.zendesk.com/product/pricing
Is anybody aware of a way in which we can use the community feature but only make it available to certain customers? So essentially invite only.
Hi Jonathan -
You can limit the visibility of and access to all topics in your community to a user segment. So, you could create a segment only for the users you wish to have access to the community and then set the visibility to each of the topics to that group.
You would need to use some JS to hide the "community" links in the header and on the main page of your Help Center and then provide direct links to the users you invite so that they can access it. But this would potentially be a workaround.
Thanks Nicole. That sounds like a good workaround. Are we able to also make it so those customers don't need to login? Or would we need customers to be able to login in order for them to interact with the community?
HI Jonathan,
Users would still need to log in. There's no way for the system to know who they are and therefore whether or not they should have access to the topics if they aren't logged in.
Would it be possible to add the ability for mobile users to add photos to posts/comments? The ability does not seem to be there when using a mobile browser now.
We have a large collection of articles in our help center and these include many internal articles that only our agents can see.
Are we able to create a community and set up gather for our agents and these internal articles or does gather only work for public facing articles?
Hi Adrean,
It's totally possible to create closed communities with Gather :-) When your admin is setting up topics in "Arrange topics", simply assign the topic to a user segment instead of to "Everyone".
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