Friendica also lets you create community forums and other types of accounts that can function as discussion forums, celebrity accounts, announcement channels, news reflectors, or organization pages, depending on how you want to interact with others. Management of these pages can be delegated to other accounts, or a parent account can be designated to easily toggle multiple identities.
To create a new linked account that can be used as a forum, log in to your normal account and go to Settings > Manage Accounts. Here you can register additional accounts with new nicknames that will be linked to your primary account.
You may appoint a delegate to manage your new account (e.g. forum page). The Delegates section of Manage Accounts page will provide you with a list of contacts on this instance under "Potential Delegates". Selecting one or more persons will give them access to manage your forum. They will be able to edit contacts, profiles, and all content for this account/page. Please use this facility wisely. Delegated managers will not be able to alter basic account settings, such as passwords or page types, or remove the account.
Additionally, this page is also where you can choose to designate an account as a parent user. If your primary account is designated as the parent user, you will be able to easily toggle identities and manage your forums or other types of accounts.
On the new account, visit the Settings > Account page. Towards the end of the page is a section for "Advanced account types". Typically you would use "Personal Page - Standard" for a normal personal account with manual approval of “friends” and “followers.” This is the default selection. On this page you can change the type of account if desired.
The other subtypes of a Personal Page are “Soapbox” and “Love-all.” A Soapbox account is an announcement channel that automatically approvals follower requests. Everything posted by the account will go out to the followers, but there will be no opportunity for interaction. This setting would typically be used for announcements or corporate communications. “Love-all” automatically approves contacts as friends.
In addition to Personal Page, there are options for Organization Page, News Page, and Community Forum. Organization and New Pages automatically approve contact requests as followers.
Community Forum provide the ability for people to become friends/fans of the forum without requiring approval. This creates a forum page where all members can freely interact.
If you mention a forum (you are a member of) in a new posting, the posting will be distributed to all members of the forum, regardless of your privacy settings for the posting.
Also, if the forum is a public forum, your posting will be public for the all internet users.
If your post is private you must also explicitly include the group in the post permissions (to allow the forum "contact" to see the post) **and** mention it in a tag (which redistributes the post to the forum members).
Posting privately to a public forum, will result in your posting being displayed on the forum wall, but not on yours.
