How to build a community platforms directory entry from four sources

What to take away

The platforms this directory covers

Five platforms anchor the list, and each earns its place for a different reason.

Discord runs servers rather than groups, with free voice and text, a paid Nitro tier and server boosts, and suits gaming, hobby and creator communities that want live chat first.

Circle sells organizers a subscription that gates courses, payments and member spaces, and suits paid membership businesses and cohort programs.

Discourse is open source and can be self-hosted or run on the company's paid hosted plan, and suits organizations that want their forum on their own domain.

Mighty Networks bundles community, courses and payments into one subscription aimed at creators, and suits people selling a program rather than running a free forum.

Facebook Groups costs the organizer nothing and reaches the largest existing audience, and it is the platform where the organizer controls the least.

Pricing for all five moves. Check each vendor's own page on the day you write the entry.

Step one: the terms, before anything else

Open the terms of service and read three things. Who the operating entity is and under what law. Who owns what a member posts, and what license the operator takes. What the operator may do to a community: suspend it, delete it, change its visibility, and with how much notice.

Discord's terms name Discord Inc. and take a broad license over posted content. Circle and Mighty Networks name their own companies and their own governing law. Facebook Groups sits under Meta's terms, which is a different document from the one a group admin reads first.

That clause about removal goes into the entry verbatim. It answers the question a community organizer most needs answered: what happens on the worst day.

Meta's terms carry a removal clause of this kind.

"If we determine that you have clearly, seriously or repeatedly breached our Terms or Policies, including in particular our Community Standards, we may suspend or permanently disable access to your account."

Copy the clause from the live page on the day you write the entry, with the URL and that date beside it.

Step two: the pricing pages, for all the buyers

Most community platforms sell to more than one kind of customer. The organizer pays. Sometimes members pay. Sometimes advertisers pay. Sometimes larger organizations buy under a different product name, and that page is not linked from the first one.

What you are looking for is not the price. It is which capabilities sit behind which gate. On Circle, courses and payments sit behind the paid tier. On Discourse, the hosted plan carries the support and the backups that the self-hosted install does not. On Discord, message history and upload limits differ between free and Nitro.

Export is the field to chase hardest. It is available on some tiers and not others, and the entry must say to whom.

Step three: the help center, for how things behave

The help center is where the operator describes what a feature does when you use it. Search it for the words that matter: export, delete, archive, transfer. Search it for moderator, ban, appeal, visibility, search engine. Export is the one to read hardest, because data portability is what decides whether leaving is possible at all.

Discourse publishes the most detail of the five, because the software is open and the documentation is public. Facebook Groups publishes the least about what happens to a group's content after deletion. Circle and Mighty Networks sit between the two.

Read the moderation articles as a pair. Most platforms describe a member-level ban handled by the organizer and a platform-level action handled by the company, with separate appeal routes. An entry that records only one of the two is describing half the system.

Step four: a test community

Documentation says what the operator intends. A community you create says what a new organizer gets. Make one, with a second account as a member. Post. Edit. Delete. Ban the second account. Look at the community logged out. Search for it a week later.

Run the same actions on two platforms and the differences show up fast. A deleted post may stay visible in a member's notification history.

A group may be reached by search engine indexing within days even when the setting is off by default. A free-tier export button may produce a file with post text but no author names and no dates.

Two of those results will contradict the documentation. Both go into the entry, with dates, beside the quoted documentation. The contradiction is not an error. It is the entry's most valuable content.

The assembled entry

The field list follows the same structure as the schema for a professional network entry: who runs the platform, who pays, what can be exported, who can remove what. Only the values change.

Put the four tables together, then add the classification in the notes on classifying community platforms. That classification sorts each platform by structure, who pays, and how far the organizer can take the content out. Then add a checked date and region.

Then add the blanks. Typical ones: whether storage deletion ever happens, what notice period applies before removal, and whether the enterprise export includes anything the free one lacks. Write each as "not stated in documentation; not testable at this tier", which tells the reader exactly what was tried.

Worked example: one assembled entry, Facebook Groups

No user count. No founding date. No feature list. No rating.

What the walk-through teaches

Four sources produced eleven filled fields and three explicit blanks. The fields a community organizer cares about most needed two sources each: what happens on removal, what export contains, and whether deletion is real.

In two cases the sources disagreed, and that pattern holds across Discord, Circle, Discourse, Mighty Networks and Facebook Groups. The documentation is the operator's account; the test is the member's account.

For what to do with a community once it exists on any of these, the community platforms overview covers moderation, norms, and the work that architecture never removes.

Common questions

Is a test community enough, or do I need a real one?

A test catches defaults and contradictions. A real community catches what happens under load and over time, which no directory can afford to run for every entry. Use the test, and invite organizers of real communities to report what the entry missed.

How long does one entry take?

Half a day for the first, including the week's wait on the search-visibility check. A couple of hours for the tenth, once the sequence is habit. The four sources do not change; only your speed at reading them does.

The service changed its help center after I wrote the entry. Do I start over?

No. Diff the saved copies, update the fields that moved, and keep the old values visible the way a platform record keeps its history. Log the change with dates. The four-source method is for building; maintenance is a smaller job with the same sources.