Members' guide · Getting started
How this community works
The rules and settings for your community: who can join, Beans, decisions, message requests, and safety.
How this community works
Every BeanPool community chooses its own rules and settings. You can check your community's rules at any time on Home, on the bottom card under the figures, by tapping How it works, or in Settings → How this community works.
Here is what each rule means.
Joining
Joining tells you who can bring new people into the community. In most communities, any member can invite someone and people can ask to join. In some communities, only the admins invite people. When joining is paused, no new members are being taken for now, and people cannot ask to join. On an open community, anyone can join with 12 secret words or a sign-in.
Private preview
When a Private preview is active, the community is getting ready. Only people the owner or an admin invites get in, and visitors from outside see nothing about the community.
Beans
Beans are the community's mutual credit currency. When Beans are on, members can trade, prices are shown, credit is available, and the community has a Commons pool. When Beans are off, the community runs on mutual aid and gifts without prices or balances.
Confirmed members and the known floor
In communities where Beans and member confirmation are active, confirmed members can owe up to an agreed amount of Beans — the known floor — while keeping an offer listed. This gives members the confidence to start trading from day one.
Messages
Messages controls what happens when someone who hasn't talked with you or added you writes to you for the first time. When message requests are on, their first message waits under requests until you accept it. When message requests are off, all direct messages arrive in your chat list straight away.
Decisions
Decisions are how the community makes formal choices together. When decisions are on, members can vote on proposals, and anyone who has completed a trade (as well as admins) can submit a proposal. When decisions are off, the moderators look after the community's operations.
Limits on new accounts
When limits on new accounts are active, new members have small daily posting and messaging allowances during their first days. This helps keep spam and fraud out while newcomers get settled.
Reported posts
When automatic hiding of reported posts is on, a post that is reported by established members from three independent circles is hidden from view until a moderator reviews it.
Repeat offenders
When repeat offender rules are active, an account that has posts removed three times in 30 days by moderators is muted automatically from posting and messaging until a moderator lifts it.
Questions about rules
Your community's owners can update these settings to suit how the community evolves. Whenever a structural rule changes, members are notified on Home. If you have questions about how your community is run, ask the admins.
Related
- HomeWhat Home is, which cards it shows on the phone and in the web app, how to add, move or remove them, picking what you're into, and privacy when you sign out.
- Joining BeanPoolTwo ways in: a community, with an invite from a member, or the global community when it is open, with 12 secret words or one sign-in. Asking a community to let you in, and how to invite someone else.
- Rules and how decisions workVoting, turnout, secret ballots, who may vote, suspension, removing a member, keepers, and convenors and lead convenors.
- MessagesStart a chat, send photos, reply, react, edit, delete, mute, and what is private.
- What the admins can seeIn a community whose admins keep a names list: what it holds about you, who can read it, what your community's server keeps, and what being confirmed means.
The same guide is in the BeanPool app, and works there without a connection: open Settings, then "Help & how it works" under BeanPool. Every other rule, guide and manual is in the Help Centre. Guide version 162.