Managing interactions on your knols

Controlling the interactions on your Knol

Knol gives visitors a variety of ways of interacting with your knol pages, such as leaving comments, writing reviews, and so forth. Also, Knol provides a variety of ways visitors can follow links between knols, such as the "Related knols" list, the "Also Wrote" list, and so forth.

Initially, these interactions are all enabled, but you as author are in control. You can change individual settings -- the choice is yours.

• Why enable interactions? Your pages will have more content, be more connected, and may be easier to find. When visitors come to your pages, they will have more ways to communicate, and more things to do.
• Why disable interactions? You gain more editorial oversight over the content appearing on your pages. You can ensure higher quality or compliance with your individual standards.
  

How to change the settings

Step one: go to your knol's Settings page

Log in, and open the Knol Settings page (click on the link highlighted on the right). Go to the General panel, and scroll down to the Interactions section.

Table of Contents

Knol automatically generates a Table of Contents from the headings in your page. Uncheck the Table of Contents box to hide it.

Contributors List

If your knol is in Moderated or Open Collaboration mode, your visitors can suggest or make edits to your content. Knol automatically shows a list of contributors. You can remove individual contributors, using the Remove from list link shown under each contributor, or you can uncheck the Contributors List to hide them all.

Unsolicited Reviews

By default, any visitor to your knol can write a review. You can prevent them by unchecking the Unsolicited Reviews box. Even if you have disabled unsolicited reviews, you can always ask someone to review your knol.

The (Author Name) also wrote list

Step Two: under the General tab, scroll down to Interactions. Check or uncheck the options, and Save.

Each knol shows up to 5 other knols which the same author published. This can help visitors to discover what else you have written, as well as making your pages more readily crawled and indexed by search engines. However, authors who have large or diverse collections of knols, or who which to have more editorial control over how their knols cross-link, can hide this list by unchecking The (Author Name) also wrote list.

The "Related Knols" list

By default, Knol calculates a set of Related Knols. These may help visitors find other knol pages about similar topics as your page. And, this goes both ways. If you allow related knols to show on your pages, your pages may be eligible to appear in on others' pages. Uncheck The "Related Knols" list in order to remove it from your knol.

Categories

Knols can be placed into Categories, and this makes them more readily found using Category Browsing. However, if you want to simplify your page, you may remove the panel which shows categories and allows category editing, by unchecking the Categories box.

Allow readers to submit categories

If categories are enabled, both authors and readers can add categories to a knol, or vote individual categories up or down. If you want exclusive control over the categories for your knol, then uncheck the Allow readers to submit categories box.

Comments

You, or your visitors, can post comments on your knol pages. You can disable this and hide all existing comments, by unchecking the Comments box.

Require approval to post comments

If comments are enabled, we ordinarily allow any logged-in user to post comments to your knols.

If you want to control what comments actually become published and publicly visible, then check the Require approval to post comments box. You, and any co-authors, and any site administrators, will still be able to post comments without needing approval. But all other comments posted to the knol will need approval.

Set as default for all future knols

Check this box before pressing Save in order to use the settings you have chosen on all future knols you create.