The News section of your community website consists of news & alerts posted by your neighborhood moderators as well as occasional posts by neighbortree.com. In our current website release, the News section of your website is the only area where posting is limited to moderators and neighbortree staff - this is so high priority messages and news can be aggregated and prioritized in one section. Members are free to submit news items to moderators and they will post on your behalf, or direct you to the appropriate content area.  Typical News post would be regarding major neighborhood announcements, crime, construction or important information posted on behalf of your HOA.

The Announcements section is open for all registered residents. This is the area where you can post any announcement relevant to your neighborhood. For example, you can announce a party and link to the Calendar section, or you can create a new Forum and announce the Forum to your neighbors. Generally speaking, announcements are for, well, announcements. If you would like to open an ongoing discussion on a particular topic, then you should use the Forum area. Examples of common announcements would be things like: garage sales, block parties, lemonade stands, new neighborhood social clubs (i.e. scrapbook, bunco parties), car pools, lemonade stands, golf outings, playdates, etc.

Neighbortree Forums are often the most active areas of a neighborhood website. This is where you can openly and candidly discuss topics that are important to the neighborhood, such as home owners association issues, rules & restriction compliance and issues relation to common areas. This is also the section where neighbors can buy and sell items or create a Forum specific to a neighborhood social club or group. All neighborhoods start with five forums, but additional neighborhood Forums can be created instantly on request.

On your website membership page, you can customize your privacy settings, include a bio and upload a personal avatar.  By default, your username and avatar are publicy viewable on posts you choose to make public, and in the neigborhood directory.  The neighborhood directory is only viewable by registered members - you can add other personal information in the neighborhood if you so choose.  Your membership profile page also includes a feature to customize notification settings as well as a message center.

Our message center is a popular feature. You can access the message center through your user profile page. We offer private or "blind" messaging where you can contact other registered members in your neighborhood without having to disclose your email address. You also have the option of being notified when you receive a message from another email - we will forward you a "you've got mail" email notice.

We have a unique email newsletter system. Your neighborhood newsletter is composed of two parts: (1) messages aggregated by neighborhood moderators (2) a brief summary with links to the latest posts since the last email. Occasionally there will be information, content or messager from neighbortree.com as well. Our automater newsletter feature can be set up to be sent out on demand, or automatically sent out weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

Our users love the Calendar feature because of the privacy settings. You can choose to post an event as "restricted" so that only registered members of the community can view the event details. This is a nice safety feature for events like playdates or neighborhood block parties where you would only want your neighbors to be aware of dates and times. For other events, such as garage sales, of course you want the whole world to know.

Your new neighborhood website is easy to use and navigate and highly customizable.  You rcontent is public when you want it to be and private when you need it be.  We have left out lots of cool features like Community Photo Albums - complete with album descriptions as well as image-by-image descriptions.  The Photo section, as with all other major areas of the website, can be public or private and includes the ability for members to make comments.  Your website also has an entire Information section where you will find the directory, neighborhood Contacts, Downloads, and community FAQ.  We look forward to working with our members to refine neighbortree.com and add new features in the coming months.