Member Forums and Diary Studies – Help Center

Member Forums are sections of the community that allow members to submit their own posts. There are two types of Member Forums:

Member Forum: The default option allows invited members to create their own posts, view other members' posts and participate by commenting and voting.
1. When members submit a post, they will be prompted to create a title and can upload or embed files if that is enabled for the forum.
2. When the member post is submitted, other members can view, comment, and vote on the post.
Diary Study: Members can only see their own posts. Moderators and clients can view and comment on a Diary Study post, but members are prevented from viewing other members' posts.
1. When members submit a diary study post, the title is automatically created and starts with Entry #1 and continues sequentially with Entry #2, and so on. This helps keep the entries organized for moderation purposes, so you can compare Entry #1 across all members, for example.
2. When the diary study post is submitted, the member will see only their posts. Mod and Client users can see all member posts and comments, but members will never see posts from other members.

Creating a New Member Forum or Diary Study

Go to Activities > Member Forums and click the + button to add a new Member Forum.

Step 1: Details

Title [required]: This is the title of the member forum that displays to members, such as "Ideas for New Products and Services"
Description [required]: Use this to describe to members the type of posts you want them to provide in this forum.

Please note: the word limit is 5,000 characters.
Publish Options > Add to Topic: By default, a link to Member Forums is added in the Categories drop-down. You can also add a forum to a topic from here.
Hide From: By default, a member forum activity box displays on the homepage and the topics landing page (if added to a topic). To hide the forum from those listings, select the checkbox.
Select Platform: Desktop and/or Mobile Apps.
Commenting: Select this option if you want members to be able to comment on other members' posts.
Diary Study: Select this option if you want to run a Diary Study. A Diary Study is when a member can only see their own submissions. Moderators and clients can view all member submissions.
Voting Type: Enable or disable voting for the member forum.
Require Approval: If you want to hide member posts from other members until they are approved by a moderator, select this option.
Allow File Uploads: If you want members to be able to upload files to their posts, enable it here. You can also choose to allow uploaded files to comments and require moderator approval for uploads from this section.
Actions & Points: If gamification is enabled, you can set point values for different actions related to member modules.
- You are now able to set a maximum point amount within a Forum. Once a member reaches that maximum inside the forum they can't earn any more points.
- It is not required to set a maximum point amount. If you do not set a maximum point total within a forum, a member may earn infinite points.

Step 2: Instructions

Call to Action: The Call to Action label is the button that displays on the Member Module landing page below the description. Enter the text that you want to display on the button here, such as "Submit your idea".
Submission Instructions: These instructions display at the top of the member submission form. This is a good place to describe what type of content you are interested in from the member to also give the member any tips that might be helpful with their submission.

Please note: the word limit is 5,000 characters.

Step 3: Invite

You can choose to allow all members to access this module or select Invitees based on a group or manual member selection.

Step 4: Schedule

Select the post and close date of the forum here.

Manage Member Forum Submissions

You can manage and edit the Member Forums from Content Management > Member Forums. In this list view, you'll see the basic details about the forums, including post and end dates as well as the total number of member submissions.

Please note that the word limit of member submissions is 15,000.

To view the individual member submissions, go to Activities > Member Posts. This section lists all individual submissions. Filter by a Member Forum to see only submissions from that forum. The Post Title links to the page in the member community where you can view the submission and comment.

Using the Actions dropdown, you can:

Export all data related to the submission.
Archive the submission. This closes commenting and voting on the submission but keeps the post visible in the community.
Close the submission. This removes it from the member community but keeps the post available in Mod Tools.
Reopen a submission if it was previously closed.
Delete permanently deletes the post from both member and mod view. This cannot be undone.