In your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community, a Group is a subset of your community population in which a limited set of users form and manage their own (public or private) space for more focused topic discussions.
To ensure these users stay on top of their conversations, the Groups feature includes several Group-specific notifications each user can manage to suit their preferences. In this article, you'll learn about each of these notifications and how to manage them.
✔️ TIP: For more general information about Groups, see Create & Manage Groups.
Before we begin…
This article focuses exclusively on how to manage your Group-based notification preferences from your profile and individual Group notification settings.
Notification types
Vanilla supports two types of notifications. When managing your preferences, you can:
- Check the bell icon box to receive real-time popup notifications; these display at the bottom left of your screen while logged in to the community.
- Check the envelope icon to receive email-based notifications; the system will send an email to the address listed in your profile.
The importance of a particular Group you belong to will dictate which types of notifications to receive (both, only one, or neither).
Manage the notification settings for your Groups
On your community's Groups page, the My Groups section at the top lists all of the Groups you belong to.
You can manage the notification settings for each Group using its Bell icon. Select one or more option to indicate what notifications to receive:
- Comments
- Posts
- Announcements
- Events
Fine-tuning your notifications on a per-Group basis gives you the flexibility to choose what content to receive, and how.
✔️ TIP: You'll also be able to make these selections upon joining a Group: after joining a Group, you'll be on its landing page, where you can set your notification settings via the Follow button.
✔️ TIP: Refer to the Notification types section above to learn the difference between popup- and email-based notifications.
Manage your Group notification preferences
You can set your default Group notification preferences from your profile, on the Notification Preferences page. These default preferences will automatically be selected when you follow a Group to streamline the process (though you can still update them at the time of following, if desired).
In the Groups section, you can choose to be notified of new:
- announcements,
- comments,
- posts,
- new or updated events for any Groups you're following.
You can also set your preference for receiving notifications related to:
- Group invitations: Receive notifications when you've been invited to join a Group.
- Group applicant approval: Users who have applied to join a Group can receive notifications when their group membership requests have been approved.
As always, you can indicate whether to receive real-time popups (bell icon) and/or emails (envelope icon) for each one.
In the Community Tasks section, you can set an additional Group-based preference:
- Group membership requests: This notification controls whether you receive notifications when a user has applied to join any Groups you've created or lead.
(Admin) Set default Group notification preferences for your users
Admins can set global, default preferences for Group notifications via the Dashboard. These preferences will be the defaults for all:
- new users who join your community and
- existing users who have never updated their notification preferences.
While preferences set by individual users supersede these global defaults, their purpose is to ensure a global baseline is in place for your community.
📝 NOTE: If you don't see this option in your community, reach out to Vanilla Support and request to have it enabled.
To set these global defaults:
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Membership > User Preferences.
- Click Edit Default Notifications.
- In the resulting dialog, set your desired preferences on the Groups tab.
- Click Save to apply them.
