The Page Discussions module gives your community the opportunity to have their say about what's happening around their area and on the website. It also allows you to manage comments and notifications, and moderate any discussions happening on the site.
To use the Page Discussions feature on a page, first, you’ll need to set it up. There are two ways to do this:
- As a site manager, you can set up discussion defaults for your website
- As a page owner or author, you can set up discussions directly on a page.
You can also choose who gets notified when comments are received or reported.
Set up discussion defaults for your website
This task can be undertaken by users with the following roles: OC Site Manager and OC System Administrator.
If you’re a site manager, you can choose defaults to determine how Page discussions are set up across your site.
- From the main menu, go to More > Site Management > your site > Settings > Page Discussions.
- Select Turn on for this website.
- In the Site-wide settings field, choose whether you want discussions to be turned on by default whenever a page is created. This can be adjusted on the page-level as long as the module is turned on.
- The Reasons for reporting comments section determines the options commenters will see if they report a comment. Choose which reasons to include, and add more reasons by typing a reason into the Enter new reason field and clicking Add Reason.
- In the Moderation style field, choose whether you want comments to be published as soon as they’re posted, or whether you want to approve them first.
- Choose Who moderates and Who receives notifications about comments.
- Save your changes.
Once you have turned Page Discussions on for the site, you can also configure this on a particular module level by navigating to the module. For example, to enable them on the Events module, go to the Site Management settings for the module, and choose if the page comments are shown on the page by default or if it should be up to the page author to turn them on for their individual pages.
Finished setting up Page discussions? See Moderating Comments for information on viewing, moderating, and exporting comments.
Set up discussions on a page
If you’re a page owner or author, you can set up comments directly on a page.
- Locate the page you want to add discussions to and navigate to the Engagement tab of the page
- In the Engagement tab for that page, check 'Yes' under the Show discussions on this page option.
- From here you can also:
- choose who gets notified about new comments and moderator reports
- view subscribers to the page and moderate comments
- Save and Publish the page when you have finished.
Can’t see this option? Your site manager may have disabled Page discussions across your website, or may not have installed the Community Engagement module. If this is the case, speak to your site administrator to enable the module.
Finished setting up Page discussions? See Moderating comments for information on viewing, moderating and exporting comments.
Get notified about comments
Choose who gets notified by email when comments are received or reported. By default, this will be the page owner and author; the page owner is the user who creates the first version of the page, while the page author is the user who updated the last version of the page. You can change these settings, and also choose to notify others.
Refer to the above screenshot which shows where the notifications settings area.
- In the Engagement tab of the page, go to the Who receives notifications?
- To notify the page owner or author:
- when new comments are received, select New Comments for that user.
- when a visitor reports a comment, select Moderator Reports for that user.
- To notify someone other than the page owner or author, select their name from the drop-down list and click Add User. Note that you can only add existing admin users, so if you want to add someone else you’ll need to add them as an admin user first.
- Save your changes.