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Community Beta

Community is a shared space for practical questions, field experience, and WildTrack360 feedback. It connects signed-in people from participating organisations without exposing any organisation's operational records.

:::info Availability Community is an invite-only beta behind the per-organisation COMMUNITY_BOARD feature flag. If Community does not appear in your navigation, your organisation has not joined the beta. While the flag is off, its pages and API routes are hidden. :::

What you can do​

Community has two ways to talk with other participants:

  • Posts for discussions and questions. Choose a category, save a draft, mention another member with @, follow a conversation, bookmark it, react to it, or add a reply.
  • Topic chats for shorter conversations in staff-managed rooms. Some rooms may be read-only or use slow mode.

Question authors and moderators can mark a reply as the accepted answer. The feed lets you filter for questions, unanswered posts, followed conversations, saved posts, drafts, or your own contributions. Search covers community posts, and the member directory searches by display name.

Community does not have private messages, user-created rooms, attachments, or presence indicators.

Join the beta​

Open Community from the workspace navigation. The first visit asks you to set up a separate community identity:

  1. Choose a display name.
  2. Add a broad region or state if you want to. Do not enter an exact location.
  3. Choose whether to show your verified organisation badge.
  4. Read and accept the community guidelines and automated moderation disclosure.
  5. Select Join Community.

Your email address, account identifiers, and WildTrack360 role are not shown in Community. Your display name, optional broad region, and organisation badge are shown according to the choices you make.

All five workspace roles can read and contribute when their home organisation has the feature enabled. Community access is separate from animal and species access. Portal and public accounts cannot join.

Create a post​

Select Create post, then choose Discussion or Question and a category. Add a title and body, then either save a draft or submit it for checking.

When you type a question title, WildTrack360 shows similar posts where it finds them. Check these before starting another thread. You may find an answer or an existing conversation to join.

New and edited posts, replies, and chat messages are checked before other people can see them. A contribution may publish after Wally checks it, wait in the moderation queue, or be held for a human moderator. Editing published content runs the check again.

You can delete your own posts, replies, and chat messages. A moderator can also delete them. Deleting a post removes its replies from the community view.

Follow, save, and answer​

  • Follow a post to receive updates about new activity.
  • Save a post to add it to the Saved feed.
  • Use reactions on posts and replies.
  • If you asked a question, mark the reply that solved it as the accepted answer.
  • Use @ in a post, reply, or chat message to mention another community member.

Notifications​

Open Notification settings from Community to choose which activity appears in your notifications. Options cover replies, mentions, accepted answers, followed posts, category updates, chat mentions, reaction summaries, and beta announcements.

Community email is off by default. If email has been enabled for the deployment, you can choose immediate messages, a daily digest, or a weekly digest, along with your Australian timezone and delivery hour. Essential moderation, appeal, and safety service messages are handled separately.

Emails contain safe titles, counts, and authenticated links. They do not copy chat bodies, removed content, or sensitive locations.

Safety and privacy​

Community is shared across participating organisations. Nothing from your animal records, care records, photos, locations, carer profiles, or other operational data is posted automatically.

Do not post:

  • exact rescue, release, nest, threatened-species, or culturally restricted locations
  • personal information or confidential organisation material
  • emergencies or urgent safety work, which belong in your organisation's normal channels
  • harassment, threats, hate, sexual content, impersonation, spam, or another person's private information

Select Report on a post or reply if it needs review. Reports go privately to the moderation team, and the reporter's identity is not shown in the moderation queue.

Wally checks every new or edited contribution. Content that needs judgement is sent to a human moderator rather than published automatically. If moderation is not configured or a check cannot finish, the contribution stays held for human review.

If a moderator removes your post, you can submit an appeal from the post. A human moderator can keep it removed or restore it.

Access and moderation roles​

An organisation's Admin role does not make someone a Community moderator. Community moderation is a platform role granted separately by a Community platform administrator.

Moderators can review held contributions, reports, and appeals. They can publish, keep held, remove, pin, or lock content. They can also manage staff-created chat rooms and apply Community warnings, timed mutes, or bans. A mute allows reading but blocks new contributions. A ban blocks Community access.

Community access is tied to the home organisation saved when a person joins. Removing that person's organisation membership revokes access. Switching the active organisation does not move the community identity to another organisation.

Setup for hosted and self-managed deployments​

Community needs more than the feature flag before an organisation should be enabled:

  • Apply the Community database migration.
  • Run pnpm db:seed:community to add the starter categories and chat rooms.
  • Set COMMUNITY_PLATFORM_ADMIN_IDS to a small, comma-separated list of Clerk user IDs.
  • Set CRON_SECRET for the internal moderation and email jobs.
  • Configure the separate COMMUNITY_MODERATION_BEDROCK_MODEL_ID, guardrail ID, and guardrail version for Wally's Community checks.
  • To offer optional email, configure the COMMUNITY_EMAIL_* settings and Resend. Email remains off when COMMUNITY_EMAIL_ENABLED=false.
  • Enable the COMMUNITY_BOARD feature flag only for organisations taking part in the beta.

The Community API currently sits under /api/community. These routes are used by the web app but do not yet have individual OpenAPI contracts, so they are not documented in the generated API Reference.