How To Enable Members Of Your Community To Upload And Attach Files To Posts
Is your community one which would benefit from allowing members to share files with each other? By default only trusted users (moderators, community managers, and admins) can upload and attach files to posts. From Control, it’s possible to allow anyone on the community to upload a file and attach it to their post to share with the rest of the community. Sharing is caring!
How To Enable File Attachments For Anyone On Your Community
- Log in to Control as a Community Manager or Admin.
- Go to Control → Settings → Attachment Permissions.
- Enable the switches for Super Users and Registered Users.
- Press Save changes, and you’re done!
How To Enable File Attachments For Specific Users On Your Community
- Go to Control → General Settings → Custom User Roles → Add Role (or edit an existing role).
- Under User has access to, enable the permission Upload files to posts.
- Press Save changes.
- Make sure the custom role is applied to the user(s) you want to grant permission to, and you’re done!
Check out this How To for a better understanding of how to create and apply custom roles.
Got any other questions about how file uploads works in general? Check out the FAQ.
Supported File Types
Once you have enabled file attachments, users can upload a wide variety of formats. Below are the currently supported file extensions, categorized for easy reference:
- Common Documents: pdf, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, txt, csv, rtf, odt.
- Images & Graphics: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, webp, svg, ico, bmp, tif, tiff, heic.
- Media (Audio/Video): mp3, mp4, wav, mov, wmv, avi, flac, mpeg, m4a.
- Design & Creative Tools: ai, xd, psd, eps, indd, idml, prproj, aep, fbx, obj, stl, skp.
- Compressed Archives: zip, 7z, rar, tar, gz, tar.gz.
- Developer & Technical: json, xml, html, css, js, cpp, h, log, har.
- Specialty Formats: olf, srt, otf, ttf.
Note: For security and performance, we recommend encouraging users to share large media files via links when possible, though the formats above are fully supported for direct upload.
Note:
- Super Users and Registered Users are not allowed to upload files until you configure your community as described above.
- If you want a specific subset of members of your community to be allowed to upload files, then give these users a custom role with the permission ‘Upload files to posts’.
- Although we protect visitors to your community by scanning every file for viruses, we do not check files for explicit or illegal content. By enabling file uploads for anyone on a public community, you accept the risk of this sort of content from being uploaded.
- There is no specific pre-moderation step for files (i.e. you can’t review files that your community members upload on the community to accept/reject).