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Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of your very own Civilized Discourse Construction Kit. 🐣

Let's get started!

Admin Dashboard

As an admin you have total control over this Discourse instance — and with great power comes great responsibility. Exercise your admin superpowers via the admin dashboard at

/admin

You can also access it via the "hamburger" menu in the upper right. Admin functions are generally marked with the wrench 🔧 icon, so look for that.

Come back and spend time exploring your admin dashboard. But first things first!

Enter Required Settings

Go to the Required tab of the site settings and enter all the required basic items. Until you set these required values, your Discourse is broken!

By default you get the same standard generic "penciled in" Discourse logo everyone gets. Look for the assets for the forum design topic; follow the instructions there to upload your logos to that topic, and then paste the uploaded image paths into the required logo settings.

Establish Staff

You are the only staff member right now. Staff members are official representatives of this community and they come in two varieties:

  1. Admins, who can do anything and configure anything on this site.
  2. Moderators, who can edit all posts and users, but cannot add categories or change any site settings.

It's lonely at the top. You may want to grant other users staff abilities – to do so click the admin button 🔧 on their user page, then look for the grant buttons.

Private or Public?

Discourse assumes you want a public discussion area. If you prefer a private one, check out these settings:

  • must_approve_users
  • login_required
  • invite_only

If you only want some parts to be private, there is a built in Staff category, and you can create more private categories that are only visible to certain groups of users.

Configure Login Methods

By default, users can only log in with traditional local username and password accounts. Want more?

If you want to get extra-fancy you can also set up single-sign on, or even build your own oAuth 2 login.

Test Email

If email is not working, you have a broken Discourse – email is required for new account signups and notifications. Test your email to make sure it is working! Visit the admin email settings, then enter an email address in the "email address to test" field and click send test email.

  • You got the test email? Great! Read that email closely, it has important email deliverability tips.
  • You didn't get the test email? This means your users probably aren't getting any signup or notification emails either.

Email deliverability can be hard. We strongly recommend using dedicated email services like Mandrill, MailGun, or MailJet, which offer generous free plans that work fine for most communities.

If you'd like to enable replying to topics via email, see this howto.

What and Who is this site for?

One of the default topics is Welcome to Discourse. This topic is pinned globally, so it will appear on the homepage for all new users. Your welcome topic is important because it is the first thing you visitors will see:

  • Where am I?
  • Who is this discussion area for?
  • What can I find here?
  • Why should I visit here?

Edit this welcome topic and write a brief introduction to your community. Think of it as your "elevator pitch" – how would you describe this site to a stranger on an elevator when you had about 1 minute to talk?

Pinning topics works a little differently in Discourse:

  • Users can hide pins on topics once they have read them via the controls at the bottom of the topic, so they don't stay pinned forever for everyone.
  • When you pin a topic, you can choose to pin it globally to all topic lists, or pin it only within its category.

New User Sandbox and the Trust System

Discourse is designed to offer safe defaults for communities, even if you set up the site and walk away from it forever. There is a trust system in Discourse where regular users automatically earn abilities to assist in governing the community as they participate over time.

All new users start out at trust level zero, in a trust sandbox with restrictions for their safety and everyone else's safety. Trust level zero users cannot …

  • post more than 2 hyperlinks
  • post any images or file attachments
  • send private messages
  • flag posts or topics
  • have actual links in the "about me" field of their profile
  • @name mention more than 2 users in a post

There are also a lot of rate limits around how many actions new users can take. Of course, new users don't stay new users forever; reading a variety of topics is enough to transition to trust level 1 in about 15 minutes.

These defaults are safe for the Internet out of the box, but they may be too conservative for your site:

  • If you are pre-vetting users, or your site is private and you approve all new users manually, you can set everyone's default trust level to 1.

  • You can individually adjust these conservative default new user restrictions. Search the settings for newuser. Two settings we see commonly adjusted are newuser max images and newuser max replies per topic.

Categories

You have three categories out of the box:

  1. meta – general discussion about the site itself. It's important!
  2. lounge – a perk for users at trust level 3 and higher
  3. staff – visible only to staff (admins and moderators)

Don't create too many initial categories, as you can overwhelm your audience. You can always add more categories later, and easily bulk recategorize topics any time. It's better to figure out organization as you go rather than assuming you'll get it all right from the beginning (hint: you won't).

To add a category, visit the categories page, then click Create Category at the upper right. You can set security per-category so only certain groups of users can see topics in that category.

Every category has an initial "About the {foo} category" topic created alongside it. This topic will be pinned to the top of the category, and the description you enter here will be used in a bunch of places. So edit that first post and give your new category a good, clear description!

File Uploads

Basic image uploads work fine out of the box stored locally, provided you have adequate disk space.

  • If you'd like other sorts of files to be uploaded beyond just images, modify the file settings.

  • If you'd rather store your images and files on Amazon S3, follow this howto.

Customize Colors

To quickly give your Discourse a distinctive look, without having to edit or understand CSS, create a new color scheme via Customize, Colors.

You can also specify custom CSS and custom HTML headers/footers to further customize the look. One common request is a navigation header that takes you back to the parent site. Here is some example HTML to put in Customize, CSS and HTML Customizations under "Header":

<div id="top-navbar" class="container">
<span id="top-navbar-links" style="height:20px;">
  <a href="http://example.com">Home</a> | 
  <a href="http://example.com/about/">About</a> | 
  <a href="http://example.com/news/">News</a> | 
  <a href="http://example.com/products/">Products</a> | 
  <a href="http://blog.example.com/blog">Blog</a> | 
  <a href="http://forums.example.com/">Forums</a>
</span>
</div>

User Content Licensing

Out of the box, Discourse defaults to Creative Commons licensing.

Your users will always retain copyright on their posts, and will always grant the forum owner enough rights to include their content on the forum.

Who is allowed to republish the content posted on this forum?

  1. Only the author
  2. Author and the owner of this forum
  3. Anybody*

Number 3 is the Discourse default – that's Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

If that's not what you want, please see our admin User Content Licensing page for a brief form that will let you cut and paste your decision into section #3 of the Terms of Service.

Maintenance

Need more Help?

This guide is a work in progress and we hope to continually improve it with your feedback.

For more assistance on configuring and running your Discourse forum, see the support category or the hosting category on meta.discourse.org.