The community section of your Forento platform is where members can connect, share insights, and ask you questions. It works like a content feed, similar to what you’d see on Patreon or in a Facebook group, and you control who can access it and who can post.

Some creators use the community to make announcements and allow members to react or comment on these posts. Others open up the space for anyone who signs up, enabling members to post and comment freely. You can also make your community exclusive, granting access only to those who are subscribed to a specific membership tier.

Within the community, there’s a built-in gamification feature that rewards members with points for completing courses and engaging in discussions. You can leverage this system to run giveaways or simply encourage more interaction and participation within your platform.

Building a community is a powerful addition to any course, e-book, or digital product. One of the key benefits is that it often supports itself, with members creating content through peer-to-peer interaction, rather than relying solely on you as the creator.

A community encourages deeper engagement, as members can discuss course material, ask questions, and share their experiences. This peer-to-peer interaction enhances the learning experience and provides support beyond what the creator can offer alone.

Additionally, platforms with an engaging community have a much higher chance of keeping active subscribers. The ongoing interaction gives people a reason to return and stay subscribed. A community also allows you to gather feedback directly from your members, helping you understand what they like, what needs improvement, and what new content they might want. It’s a great way to fine-tune your offerings based on real input, making your platform even more valuable over time.

When opening the community page from the backend, you're first asked to enable the community. After doing this, you'll be brought to see six different pages.

The Posts page is where you can view your community's feed and publish posts as the admin. When creating a post, you're required to add a title and text. Additionally, you can include a poll (great for gathering feedback from your members), a downloadable attachment, and assign a category to help organize the post.

On this page, you can create categories to organize your posts, making it easier for members to navigate and find content within the community.

On this page, you'll see a list of members who have joined your community. Keep in mind that this list may not always match the users list for your platform, as members need to enable their community profile. Since profiles are visible to others, members must opt-in before accessing the community.

This page displays all community members in a leaderboard list. Depending on how many points they've acquired since signing up, they'll show up. Some creators use this for giveaways (the winner is number one on the leaderboard each week or month, for example) whereas other creators just leave it open and let the leaderboard speak for itself (just seeing the leaderboard makes some members incentivized to engage more)

The Messages section allows you to send private messages directly to specific members of your community, enabling one-on-one communication.

In the Settings view, you can manage default user access and control the gamification system. User access levels include:

The selected option above will be applied to all default users of your platform (users without a membership subscription)

In the Settings view, you can also manage the gamification system, which encourages engagement by awarding points to members when they interact within the community or complete courses. By default, there are three pre-set levels with titles that unlock at 0, 25, and 100 points.

You can customize the system to better suit your community by renaming, removing, or adding levels. You also have the option to change the point thresholds for when each level is unlocked, allowing you to tailor the rewards system to fit your platform’s needs.