Kemble Circle — communities at any scale
Spaces, roles, voice stages and moderation for customer, creator, developer, gaming and education communities. Free, because money attaches to a company account.
Building the space
Everything a community organizer sets up on day one.
- Spaces and categories
- Group channels into categories, reorder them, and move a channel between them. Reordering takes the complete ordering, so a half-applied drag cannot leave the sidebar in a state nobody intended.
- Roles you design
- Six built-in roles as a starting point, all editable, plus as many custom ones as you need — with a closed colour set so a member list stays readable rather than becoming a rainbow.
- Announcement channels
- Everyone reads, only the people who manage the channel write. Enforced on the posting path, not merely drawn with a different icon.
- Invite codes
- Shareable codes with an expiry, redeemed against the plan ceiling at the moment someone joins rather than when the link was made.
Moderation
The floor of a community product, not a later addition.
- Timeout, remove, ban
- Three graduated responses, each taking a reason. A ban can purge a window of recent messages in the same action.
- A log moderators can read
- Scoped to the space and readable by the people whose actions write to it — not only by the owner. That is what makes a volunteer moderation team willing to act.
- Slow mode
- A per-channel interval between messages, with a countdown in the composer instead of an error, and a bypass for the people running the room.
- Per-channel overwrites
- Allow or deny a permission for one role in one channel, layered over the role union with deny winning.
Live
Being in the same room.
- Voice rooms
- Mesh for small rooms, a selective forwarding server for large ones, with the participant ceiling set by plan.
- Stages
- Speaking is a separate permission from connecting, enforced both when joining the room and when the media token is minted — an audience cannot publish by talking to the media server directly.
- Presence and typing
- Who is here, who is speaking, and who is writing, delivered over one socket for everything you can see rather than one per channel.
Growing
What happens after the first hundred people.
- Member directory
- Search and filter the people in a space, by role and by when they joined.
- Threads
- The mechanism that lets a busy channel carry ten conversations without any of them being unreadable.
- Guests
- Scoped to the channels they were invited to, and deliberately unable to start a direct message with everyone in the organization.
Free, and meant to be
A community organizer should never meet a paywall for running a community. Kemble Circle runs on the free plan; the paid plans exist for company accounts, where the seat count and the compliance features are what is being bought.