Key Areas & Configurations for Administrative Features in the Admin Console

Overview

We cover the majority of the admin through the Moderation and Permission training. There are a few key areas/configurations that the customer should address early on to successfully begin working towards launch.

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NOTE:

Everything lists in the order it displays in the admin console, but some content redirects to a different section if it is more relevant for another role. For example, admin features relevant to the moderation role.

SITE

General Menu

• General > Settings: Be sure to update these configurations for your new community to take the first step in making your site have a more branded look and feel.
• General > Navigation: Use this menu to configure list sizes and list sorts for activity, answer, award, private message, questions, default user awards, default user, comments, hottest sort days, and default index sort.
• General > Sitemaps: Use this menu to configure sitemaps.
• General > JIRA API Integration: Use this menu to configure JIRA API Integration.
• General > Custom Header/Footer: These text fields allow your team to apply a variety of minor to moderate changes to our out-of-the-box theme without having to use our Theme SDK.

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TIP:

While this area allows a decent amount of changes, keep in mind most changes you can make in this area will only alter the look of the site from a surface level. You must use our SDK to rearrange views, extend/add functionality, and drastically alter the base templates of our theme.

• There are a few helpful articles below that will provide some examples and pre-written code to get you started with some changes you can make in this area.
  • Color Customizations with CSS:
    • Navigate to Site > Custom Configurations > Custom Header/Footer.
    • Enter the following styling information into the text field labeled Head:

  <style> 
  \#bottom .extra-inner { 
  background: #888 none repeat scroll 0 0 
  } 
  </style> 
  

  • This will make your footer background a lighter gray color (like the above example). To change the color, look up the hex code for whatever color you'd prefer and swap it out with #888 above.
  • Quick Grab Code Snippets

Layout Menu

• Layout > Manage Themes: You can see your current theme, available themes and the recompile button used for any changes made to LESS files.
• Layout > Theme Variations: Determine your community support style. We offer two options. Our default is a Facebook style of thumbs up liking. We also offer a Stack Overflow style of up and down voting. Regardless of which variation you want, both configuration options under the Control Bar and Node left menus must match. You can only pick one!

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Keep in mind that using our permissions, you can allow users to only upvote if you like the up/down voting style but don't want to allow down votes within your community.

• Layout > Manage Static Pages: Not all relevant information fits best in the form of a Question, Idea, or an Article. That's where static pages come in. By creating a static page, you're able to provide important information to your users in a different way without having to direct them outside the community. Implementing static pages fit dozens of use cases. One primary use is to provide a welcome letter/best practices outline so that new users immediately feel more comfortable and confident in your community.
  • Example: Our Customer Success Portal is a great example of how you can combine a Custom Web Panel and a static page to provide important information in a new way. In this example, we defined a number of available plugins for AnswerHub communities.
• Layout > Custom Web Panel: Here you will create and enable your custom web panels to be in either the main section of your page or in the right sidebar.

User Engagement Menu

• User Engagement > Awards: Displays a table of the currently installed awards for the site organized by different types of actions. Each drop-down displays the award level (bronze, silver or gold), the name of the awards pertaining to that action and a description of how to obtain the award.
• User Engagement > Default Reputation Levels: This page displays our recommendations for permissions that are commonly set by reputation x and what those thresholds are. This is a static page meant for you to use it for reference long-term. Meaning, if your team changes the default permissions, this page will not reflect those changes.
• User Engagement > Reputation gains/losses: This is the third method for users to earn reputation points for a few select actions. It also allows you to determine how many points they will earn/lose for those interactions.

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If you increase/decrease these values, be sure to keep that in mind for the permissions dependent on reputation. If users can earn points too quickly, allowing them to surpass the permission-based thresholds, they may not adjust to the community environment enough for you to trust them with those additional capabilities.

Notifications Menu

• Notifications > Default Settings: You can configure the default email notifications here.
• Notifications > Site Notifications: Used to create site-wide notifications. Start and end dates are configurable.
• Notifications > Outgoing email:
  • You must use your own mail server/client to configure the outgoing email. AnswerHub acts as the triggering mechanism to send email notifications through your email client.
  • We recommend using a unique email address for these configurations. Using a shared or personal email will cause your view of notifications and mailbox to become cluttered with community-related emails.
  • Keep track of the username/password so you can log into your mail client to view sent notifications. This can come in handy down the road.
    • Supporting documentation: https://success.answerhub.com/articles/19562/how-to-configure-outgoing-and-incoming-email-setti.html

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You need to set this up ASAP. The system will not send notifications if these configurations are not in place. This includes the default welcome email we send to new users. Meaning they cannot access their login credentials unless you manually send the info to them.

• Test & Confirm: Once your team has configured your outgoing email settings, you can go to the test site and confirm the area to verify your configuration was successful. Green means you're good to go, red means you need to revisit your configurations. The mail output log provided should point your team to the area that needs to be re-configured.

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In this view, there is a drop-down list for all our out-of-the-box emails that we can potentially send to a user, except for our daily and weekly email digest options. These template names directly correlate to the template names of our customizable email notifications within our SDK.

• If your team is curious about how these look out-of-the-box or you've done some customizations to them using our SDK, you can trigger a test for each template. Afterward, log into your mail client and view your sent folder. The test notification will appear here.
• Notifications / Incoming email: This isn't always utilized by our partners, but it requires the same type of resources and configurations as the outgoing email settings.

Optimization Menu

• Optimization > Manage Search: This area is largely unused during your day-to-day management, however, use it in the following situations:
  • New data created in bulk: If you have imported or used our REST API to create nodes (content, users, topics, etc.) it is always a suggested practice to re-index the search.
  • Significant theme update/change in functionality: If you have customized your theme, you will want to re-index your search.
  • Odd behavior: If you think your search is acting odd, it's always a good idea to perform a simple search re-index before escalating the issue to our support team.
• Optimization > Cache Management: You can view the current status of any cache on your AnswerHub site. If your imports (such as new badge icons) do not display on your AnswerHub site, this page allows you to manually flush (clear) the current cache so the changes will display on your site.
  • Best Practice: When a change affects your AnswerHub functionality (for example, after installing new plugins or reformatting your theme), it’s a good idea to clear the cache.
• Optimization > Configure Robots.txt: Used to set up your site to prevent robots from indexing the web and direct search results of your AnswerHub site.
  • In the Content field, next to Sitemap, enter the location of your sitemap.xml file.
  • In the Content field, next to User-Agent, enter the specific bots you want to deny access to.
    • Under each instance of  User-Agent, next to Disallow, enter the directory (each on a separate line) that you want to deny the specified bot access to.

CONTENT

We explaing the following in 101 Moderation Training:

• Manage > All Content
• Manage > In Moderation
• Manage > Reported
• Manage > Topics

Site Structure Menu

• Site Structure > Spaces: This is where your team can begin to create spaces and sub-spaces. You can edit these on the fly at any time, including altering the hierarchy of your spaces by assigning a new or existing space to have a parent space. The option to assign a parent space displays on the create a new space page for new spaces by selecting the Add Space button. For existing spaces, click the pencil icon (edit option) to reach the same view.
• Site Structure > Smart Spaces: Smart Spaces allow you to aggregate content from different topics, users, even search queries into a single view. Create a new Smart Space by selecting the Add Smart Space button and adjust the filters to populate it by selecting the Manage link.
• Site Structure > Space Settings: You can give or revoke your users’ access to the Spaces drop-down menu and the Help space in the community UI from the Space Settings page.
  • To make the  Spaces drop-down menu display in the AnswerHub UI, select the Activate in Theme checkbox.
  • If your AnswerHub site does not have the Spaces drop-down menu activated, you can still give users quick access to the Help space by activating the Show Meta Site Link checkbox.

Node Structure Menu

• Node Structure > General Settings: You can configure Questions, Comments and Vote Settings and manage the Question Extended Properties on this page.
• Node Structure > Attachment settings: There are several tabs on this page. The first tab, Allowed Types, defines a list of file extensions that end users can attach and embed within their content. The other tabs are specific to the content type. All allow you to define min/max number of and total file size for attachments.
• Node Structure > Custom Node Metadata: Allows administrators to create additional Metadata properties attached to a node. You can access these metadata properties by templates, or plugins that support them, to process the additional data.
• Node Structure > Idea Configurations: This is where you can determine the number of unique idea specific votes your users inherit when they create their account. If you're unsure, we suggest setting this to -1 so that your users have an unlimited number of votes.
• Node Structure > Idea workflow: In this area, you can define and customize the lifecycle stages your ideas should move through.

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If you limit the number of idea-specific votes your users have, you need to provide the ability to earn votes back by altering the Votes and Reputation configurations for your various lifecycle stages.

• This area allows you to award votes and reputation points to the original author and/or the users who have voted for the idea.

Control Menu

• Control > Content Permissions: You can enable or disable specific content types (kbentry, Questions, Ideas) per space.
• Control > Sanitization Settings: Use the first text area to define which HTML tags and attributes you want to allow. Each line should contain one tag, followed by all the attributes you want to allow on that tag, if any. List out the allowed URL protocols and IFrame sources in the next two text areas.
• Control > Spam protection: Several spam protection methods are available to configure on this page.

USERS & GROUPS

Manage Menu

• Manage > Users: Click the Create/Import Users button to navigate to the Create/Import Users page where you can either select the Create User tab or the Import Users tab. In the Create User tab you have text fields to fill out. In the Import Users tab, you can configure the type of information and the format of the information that imports to create new users. In both tabs, you also have the option to add the user(s) to specific groups.
• Manage > Identified Experts: The Admin page provides a tabular view that lists the experts identified in the system along with the following information.
• Manage > Groups: You can see all the default groups and create new groups from this page. The wrench icon allows you to edit group information and configure the group permissions.
• Manage > Custom Roles: This page allows you to create new custom roles and shows you a tabular view of the role names and their labels once you have made them.

Settings Menu

• Settings > General: There are several text fields and check boxes to configure how you want to handle users and groups in your community. The following are two common options to either select or deselect:
  • Use real name as screen name
  • Hide deactivated content from lists
• Settings > Default Followed Items (New User Notifications): When you create a new user they will adopt the default notification settings shown here. Make sure our defaults align with what your default preferences are. Once you have created the user's account, they have the ability to manage their own notification preferences. Changes made to this area will only apply to future users. They will not override an existing user's preferences.

ANALYTICS

• Standard Analytics: This internal view provides you with a few quick-grab metrics. These metrics consist of a total of new users, Questions, and Answers within the last week, month, or year.
• Advanced Analytics: Our advanced analytics provide you with a substantially larger set of options for mining your data for specific metrics to gain insight into the health and user behavior within your community.
  • Mode: View online (default) or export any report.
  • Data: This will be the main filter used to find your desired metrics. Depending on which of the options you select, you'll often get an additional subset of new filters to further refine your results which provides more specific insight.
  • Graphic: Breaks down the results displayed in the graph into monthly, daily, weekly, or hourly increments.
  • Time: Expand or reduce the amount of time you would like to pull metrics for. You can choose between 6 months, last year, last 2 years, or even define your own custom time frame.
  • Groups: All users belong to user groups. By filtering your final report to only show results related to users within a specific group, you are able to identify the balance of interactions across your community.
    • For example, if my long-term goal is to implement a community to reduce the workload on our support team when it comes to assisting our customers, I would run one main report and then proceed to filter it in two ways (reports displayed below). The metrics provided in this example show me that the balance between the contributions made by our Customer Success Team is less than that of the customers. Clearly, the customers are beginning to become more self-sufficient which will contribute to reaching my end goal of reducing the overhead for the Customer Success Team.
      • Main report: Total number of answers provided = 50
        • Sub-report 1: Filter by Employees group; new total = 20
        • Sub-report 2: Filter by Customers group; new total = 30
• Spaces: You can further refine your results to be relevant to a specific space and/or the respective sub-spaces to see how that metric compares to the site-wide view.
  • For example, if there were 50 new questions this week in my community and 40 of them got posted in the Product X Support space, that could lead me to the conclusion that our documentation for that product needs updating.

PLUGINS

• Plugins > Manage Plugins: You must be a member of the Network Administrators user group to access this page. If you're not, it displays an access denied message. This is a built-in safety net. Most of the base functionality within AnswerHub implements in the form of a plugin. Meaning, if you accidentally grant a user admin access, they can quickly wreak havoc if they can enable/disable (turn on/off) plugins with just a few clicks.
  • Enabled (turned on)
  • Disabled (turned off)