A community is a special type of journal that more than one user can post to. Communities function as a form of group discussion. They can have specific discussion topics -- such as a television show, a hobby, or a specific city or country -- or they can be a place for you and your friends to talk about your lives.

Some users choose to create closed, single-poster communities as an alternative to creating another personal journal for a specific sub-topic of their journal, since you can post to a community without having to log out of your account and log into another personal journal account.

When you post to a community, your post will display both your username and the community's name. You can manage the settings for your post and screen, freeze, and delete comments to your entries the same way you can on entries in your personal journal.

Communities have administrators (usually called 'admins' for short). The admin of a community controls community settings, including who can post entries, who can join the community, who can comment to entries in the community, and the profile descriptions and journal style of the community. Admins can also delete posts made to a community and screen, freeze, and delete comments on all entries in the community.

The person who created the community is automatically a community admin, and can add others to the admin team if the community is larger than one person can reasonably handle. The list of admins is visible on the community's profile.

There are several methods for joining a community. If you're viewing the community page, the navigation bar will have a "Join Community" link. If you're viewing the community's profile, the interactions menu includes a "Join Community" link. Also, any communities you have subscribed to, but have not joined, will have a join link on your Manage Circle page.

If the community has open membership, joining the community will give you membership in that community.

If the community administrator has chosen moderated membership, membership requests must be approved by a community administrator.

Some communities have closed membership, meaning the community is closed to new members unless invited by an admin. In these cases, the join link on the profile will be greyed out.

You can find out which type of community it is on the community's profile page. The easiest way to reach that is by clicking the icon beside the community's name. Or you can navigate to https://username.dreamwidth.org, replacing your name with the name of the community you want to know about.

Posting to a community is just like posting to your personal journal. If you're a member of the community, and the community has open posting access (or if the community has restricted posting and the community admin has explicitly given you posting access), there will be a "Post To:" drop-down box on the Post an Entry page. Select the name of the community you want to post to from this drop-down box. For confirmation, the "Post to" button you push to actually post your entry will change to say "Post to: communityname" (using the actual name of the community).

If you don't see the community in the drop-down box when you want to post, it could mean one of several things:

• You may have subscribed to the community, but not joined it. Join the community and try again.


• You may be a member of the community, but the community may have restricted posting. Check the community rules and see what the admin has said about posting access. If there's no specific statement about how to be granted posting access, contact the admin of the community to ask.


• You may have been banned from the community. If you aren't certain why, contact the admin of the community to ask.

You can also post to a community if you are a member by using the "Post to Community" link in the interaction menu on the community's profile.

Some communities allow people who aren't members to post to the community. If the community you want to post to is one of them, you will see the "Post to Community" link in the interaction menu on the profile even if you aren't a member of the community.

Some communities are set to "moderated posting", which means entries are placed into a "moderation queue" for community moderators (who are appointed by the community admin) to review and approve before they're posted to the community. If your community entry is held for moderation, you'll receive an email when a moderator takes action on your entry, telling you whether the entry was posted or rejected.

You can find out what the settings are for any community on its profile. The easiest way to reach the profile is by clicking the icon beside the community's name. You can also navigate to https://username.dreamwidth.org/profile, replacing your name with the name of the community you want to know about.

In general, you will have two options for security settings when you post to a community. You can either make the entry public so anyone will be able to see it, or members only so that only members of the community can see it. When posting to members only, remember that other people may join the community in the future, and they'd be able to see the entry then.

If the administrator of the community has set a minimum security level for the community, then you won't be able to post public entries.

If you're the administrator of the community you're posting to, you'll also have a third security option of administrators only. In this case, only you and other administrators of the community will be able to see the entry.

If a community you belong to seems to have been abandoned by its admin, open a Support request in the "Terms of Service" category.

In most cases, if the former admin's account has been deleted and purged from the system, we'll transfer administrator access to an active member of the community. If the community administrator's account is not deleted and purged, but the administrator hasn't been active on Dreamwidth for a long time, we'll try contacting them first to see if they want to keep the community (and become more active in administering it), transfer the community to a community member of their choice, or have us choose a new administrator for the community.

Each situation is different, though, and may be handled slightly differently -- these are just general guidelines.

If you aren't sure if the community admin is still active on Dreamwidth, you can always try posting to the community to see. Be sure to let the Terms of Service team know that you've done that, and include a link to the entry, so they can have the additional information.

To find all the entries by just one user in a community name, navigate to http://community-name.dreamwidth.org/?poster=username, replacing community-name with the name of the community you would like to search in, and username with the name of the user whose posts you would like to see.

For instance, to see all posts made by denise in dw_suggestions, you would use: https://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/?poster=denise

This method only works for regular users, and not OpenID users. This means that this method will not work for imported community entries.