The Community is a public gallery of documents people are proud of. Anyone can browse it, filter it by category and tag, open a document read-only, like it, and make their own copy to start from. Sharing a document there is a way to show your work and to help someone else get going.
Sharing a document
You need to be signed in to share a document to the Community, so every document there has a real author. As a guest, the Community tab of the Share dialog offers Sign In to Share instead. Browsing, liking and copying need no account.
Open the dialog's Community tab, beside Passes, and choose Share to Community below its introduction.
Give it a title (3 to 80 characters), a description of what it shows and how someone could reuse it (20 to 500 characters), a Category and up to five Tags, then choose Share to Community.
The dialog shows a preview of the card people will see. Once it is shared, a confirmation offers Copy Link to copy the Community page's address, and View Post to open it.
Good tags are the words someone would search for: the tools, the method, the subject. Each tag is 2 to 24 characters. They help people find your document through the filters on the Community page.
Your document is shared anonymously by default: it shows as Anonymous, with no name or picture. Turn off Share Anonymously in the same dialog to show your name instead.
What people see
A Community document always shows your latest saved version, so your edits appear there too. Visitors see it read-only:
- They can pan, zoom and switch tabs, and make their own copy with Make a Copy. Their copy is theirs; it never changes yours.
- They do not join your document live, so you won't see strangers' cursors, and you won't get an email for each visitor.
- Comments stay private. They are not shown to Community visitors.
Each card shows how many people liked the document and how many made a copy.
Opened from the Community, a document is read-only for you too, so you can see it exactly as visitors do and never change it by accident from the gallery. The bar across the top offers Edit Your Document, which opens your own document.
Editing or removing it
Open the Share dialog again, on its Community tab. It shows your post with its category, likes and copies, and three buttons:
- View Post opens its Community page in a new tab.
- Edit Listing changes the title, description, category, tags or Share Anonymously. Choose Save Changes when you are done.
- Remove From Community asks you to confirm, then takes it out of the gallery straight away. Its likes and copy count go with it; copies people already made stay theirs. Choose Keep It to back out.
A document in the Community can't also have a share password, because a public document can't ask its visitors for one. While it is listed, Password Protection is locked off; while a password is set, Share to Community is unavailable. Remove one to use the other.
If your post is hidden
Anyone can report a post. When three different people, on different networks, report yours, it is taken out of the Community automatically and for good: nobody reviews posts by hand, so the reports decide. The Community tab of the Share dialog then says Hidden after reports, and it shows in My Shares marked Hidden. Only you can see it. A hidden post can't be edited or removed, so the same document can't be shared again, but your document itself is untouched and you can still set a share password on it.
Things that can't be shared
- Documents in a team library belong to the team, so they can't be shared to the Community.
- A document whose first tab is empty can't be shared until you add something to that tab, even if other tabs have content.
- A document in the Trash disappears from the Community until you restore it.
Finding documents
Browsing the Community, searching it by tag and making your own copy are covered in Finding Documents in the Community, along with reporting a document that shouldn't be there.
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