====== Forums ======

Friendica also lets you create community forums and other types of accounts that can function as discussion forums, celebrity accounts, announcement channels, news reflectors, or organization pages, depending on how you want to interact with others. Management of these pages can be delegated to other accounts, or a parent account can be designated to easily toggle multiple identities.

Every page in Friendica has a nickname and these must all be unique. This applies to all forums, whether they are normal profiles or forum profiles.

===== Managing Accounts =====

To create a new linked account that can be used as a forum, log in to your normal account and go to Settings -> Manage Accounts. Here you can register additional accounts with new nicknames that will be linked to your primary account.

You may appoint a delegate to manage your new account (e.g. forum page). The Delegates section of Manage Accounts page will provide you with a list of contacts on this instance under “Potential Delegates”. Selecting one or more persons will give them access to manage your forum. They will be able to edit contacts, profiles, and all content for this account/page. Please use this facility wisely. Delegated managers will not be able to alter basic account settings, such as passwords or page types, or remove the account.

Additionally, this page is also where you can choose to designate an account as a parent user. If your primary account is designated as the parent user, you will be able to easily toggle identities and manage your forums or other types of accounts.

===== Types of Accounts =====

On the new account, visit the Settings -> Account page. Towards the end of the page is a section for “Advanced account types”. Typically you would use “Personal Page - Standard” for a normal personal account with manual approval of “friends” and “followers.” This is the default selection. On this page you can change the type of account if desired.

The other subtypes of a Personal Page are “Soapbox” and “Love-all.” A Soapbox account is an announcement channel that automatically approvals follower requests. Everything posted by the account will go out to the followers, but there will be no opportunity for interaction. This setting would typically be used for announcements or corporate communications. “Love-all” automatically approves contacts as friends.

In addition to Personal Page, there are options for Organization Page, News Page, and Community Forum. Organization and New Pages automatically approve contact requests as followers.

Community Forum provide the ability for people to become friends/fans of the forum without requiring approval. This creates a forum page where all members can freely interact.

===== Posting to Community forums =====

If you are a member of a community forum, you may post to the forum by including an @-tag in the post mentioning the forum. For example @bicycle would send my post to all members of the group “bicycle” in addition to the normal recipients. If you mention a forum (you are a member of) in a new posting, the posting will be distributed to all members of the forum, regardless of your privacy settings for the posting. Also, if the forum is a public forum, your posting will be public for the all internet users. If your post is private you must also explicitly include the group in the post permissions (to allow the forum “contact” to see the post) **and** mention it in a tag (which redistributes the post to the forum members). Posting privately to a public forum, will result in your posting being displayed on the forum wall, but not on yours.

Additionally it is possible to address a forum with the exclamation mark. In the example above this means that you can address the bicycle forum via !bicycle. The difference to the @ is that the post will only be sent to the addressed forum. This also means that you shouldn’t address multiple forums in a single post in that way since it will only be distributed by one the forums.

You may also post to a community forum by posting a “wall-to-wall” post using secure cross-site authentication.

Comments which are relayed to community forums will be relayed back to the original post creator. Mentioning the forum with an @-tag in a comment does not relay the message, as distribution is controlled entirely by the original post creator.