With public forums, your customers can browse each other's public discussions by category, so one answer helps everyone with the same question. Forums are on when you create a Tender site, with three categories to start with: Problems, Questions and Suggestions. You can rename them or add your own.
Forum settings are in the dashboard under Account & Settings › Settings, in the Public Forums box.
Who can reply: Support only
Support only stops customers replying to each other's public discussions. Your support staff can still reply, and so can the people already on a discussion: the customer who started it, its watchers and members of their company. Everyone else can read it. New sites start with Support only ticked, which also keeps spammers from posting in your discussions.
Untick it if you want an open forum where any customer can join in. Click Save your changes at the bottom of the page.
Categories for the forum
Each category has settings that shape the forum (in the dashboard, Manage Categories, then the category):
- Visible lists the category on your site's discussion pages.
- Private makes new discussions in the category private by default: only the customer and your team see them. Use it for things like billing.
- Announcement lets only your support staff start discussions in the category, with comments turned off. Good for release notes and news.
- Beta and Important show the category only to customers you've marked as beta or important. These two appear once Enable Beta Users is ticked in Settings. See User Class: Important & Beta.
Turning the forum off
Click Off in the Public Forums box to turn the forum off straight away. Customers then see only their own discussions, never anyone else's, and every new discussion is private. Discussions that were public before stay where they are, but customers can no longer browse them.
With the forum off, Allow private discussions decides whether customers can still start discussions at all. Untick it for a site that's only a knowledge base (see Using Tender as a knowledge base).
To close the whole site to anyone who isn't a member, use Private Mode instead. See Locking down your Tender: privacy and closed sites.