When you create a community, you decide whether membership will be closed, moderated, or open, and whether all members will have posting access. If you change your mind about your community's
settings, you can edit them at the
Community Management page. You may also want to invite users to your new community.
- Open Membership: If your community gives posting access to All Members, you do not need to do anything to add users. These options allow any LiveJournal user to obtain membership in your community without seeking your approval. You can also allow anyone to join via Open Membership, but grant Posting Access individually using the Members (http://www.livejournal.com/community/members.bml?comm=communityname) link on the Community Management page.
- Moderated Membership. Users must request membership by attempting to join. At the bottom of the Community Management page, you can select to be notified by email every time someone requests membership in a community you maintain, or you can choose only to be notified when you load the Community Management page. When you load the Community Management page and there are pending membership requests, you will see "Members, # pending" (where # is a number); click on the # pending (http://www.livejournal.com/community/pending.bml?comm=communityname) link to reach a page where you can accept or reject these membership requests.
- Closed Membership: Only users you invite can join the community. No one can join on their own.
Inviting Users to Your Community
You can invite users to your community, which will allow them to accept or decline membership. To invite users to your community, simply go to the
Community Management page and select the
Members (http://www.livejournal.com/community/members.bml?comm=
communityname) link for the appropriate community. If there is more than one page of members for the community, go to the last page.
When you reach the bottom of the
Members page, you will see blank spaces for the usernames you wish to invite. After entering their usernames and selecting the desired access levels (member, moderator, maintainer, posting access), click the "Update settings" button to add your community invitation to their
Manage Community Invitations page.
Invited users will need to respond to the invitation from the
Manage Community Invitations page within 30 days; otherwise, the invitation will expire. Since only some users receive automatic
notifications about invites, you may wish to notify invited users by email, a LiveJournal comment, a LiveJournal entry, etc. Please be aware that if you choose to post comments or entries, they are still subject to LiveJournal's policies on
community promotions.
After sending invitations, you can go back to the
Community Management page and select the appropriate
Invitations (http://www.livejournal.com/community/sentinvites.bml?comm=
communityname) link to view their status (accepted, declined, outstanding). If you change your mind about inviting someone to join your community, you may also use this page to cancel an outstanding invitation. To do so, check the box next to the invitation's status and press the "Cancel Invitations" button.