Community Settings
The Community area lets your residents connect with each other — recommendations, giveaways, a discussion feed, lost & found, classifieds, and private neighbor messaging. It's off by default, and you decide whether to turn it on and which features to enable.
This guide is for Owners and Managers. Residents use the features you enable here — see the resident Community overview.
Turning on the Community area
Go to Community → Community Settings in your board portal.
- Turn on Enable community area. This is the master switch — until it's on, residents see no community features at all.
- Once enabled, turn on the individual features you want for your community.
Available features
| Feature | What residents get |
|---|---|
| Recommendations | A resident-built directory of recommended outside service providers, browsable by trade |
| Giveaways | Residents post free items with photos |
| Lost & Found | Residents report lost items and post found ones |
| Community Feed | An open neighborhood discussion board |
| Classifieds | Residents buy and sell items (with prices) |
| Messages | Private one-to-one messaging between residents |
| Event Discussions | A comment thread on community calendar events |
Turn off any feature you don't want; residents immediately stop seeing it. Turning off the master switch hides the entire Community area.
How residents join
Enabling the area doesn't expose anyone automatically. Each resident chooses to participate by creating a Community Profile, and they control whether their contact details are shared. Until a resident opts in, they don't appear anywhere in the community.
Choosing what to enable
Many communities start with the lower-key, structured features — Recommendations, Giveaways, and Lost & Found — which tend to need little oversight. Consider enabling the open Community Feed and resident Messages once you're comfortable with the moderation tools, since open discussion and private messaging carry more responsibility.
Your responsibilities
When you enable community features, residents can post content other residents see. You're responsible for reviewing reported content. PorchQ helps by automatically hiding content that several residents report, but a manager should review the moderation queue regularly.