Overview
A moderation message is a way for Mods and Admins to inform visitors or members of your community of news, events or anything you wish to share.
Messages can appear anywhere in your community (read on for details), and can be used to inform your users of news and events.
Check out these examples:
As you may have noticed, you can add basic HTML to your message, including bold, links, images and more!
Creating a new message
Navigate to your Forum Dashboard, then select the Moderation tab, and the "Messages" option on the side
From within this menu, you can enable/disable, edit or delete existing messages, or you can click 'Add message" from the top right hand side.
Once you click "Add Message" you will see the following screen:
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Here are the items you can configure:
- Appearance: Select the type of message: Casual, Information, Alert or Warning. Each of these comes with a distinctive colour (as set in your base theme) and distinct CSS Classes you can override in your Custom Theme.
- Message: This is where you add the text or the actual content. It supports basic HTML but no Javascript. (If you need that for ad code, check out pockets.)
- Page: Determine where on the forum your message will appear, for example: just discussion pages, profile pages or even all pages.
- Position: It can appear above content or on the sidebar.
- Category: Choose the category the message should appear in.
You may also optionally include subcategories.
If you choose to make a message dismissible, individual logged-in users can dismiss it, but it will continue to remain for Guests and users who have not actively dismissed it.
Once a message has been dismissed, it cannot be retrieved for that user, so it's recommended that you don't make key messages dismissible.
Communication is key, but don't overdo it
While messages are important in communicating with your community, you can also easily annoy your members too. A community manager should review messages to keep only the most recent/ important ones. There is no worse user experience for a forum than a first page full of messages and announcements.
