It's important to load accurate and up-to-date community code of conduct and privacy policies loaded in your dashboard, as community members agree to them at sign up, and can access them at any time from their profile menu.

When they initially sign up, each member of your community agrees to your community's Code of Conduct, Privacy Policy and optional terms and conditions.

These policies are linked at the base of the sign up modal:

Members can access these policies at any time from the community front end in their profile drop down menu. The policies are hyperlinked at the base of that menu.

Your code of conduct is an agreement on the rules of behavior for the members of the community. It should outline the norms, rules, responsibilities, or proper practices that a member should follow when in the community.

Once you have the Code of Conduct created, save it as a publicly accessible web document as you'll need to enter the URL in your community settings within the dashboard.

Event attendees agree to the community's Code of Conduct by joining the event, and will see a direct link to the Code of Conduct on event registration confirmation pop-ups.

Your Privacy Policy states how the platform treats personal information or 'Personal Data' that is gathered when using or accessing the platform. You may be able to use the same Privacy Policy that you use on your website.

Once you have the Privacy Policy created, save it as a publicly accessible web document as you'll need to enter the URL in your community settings within the dashboard.

You can also load a Terms of Service document to your Gradual account, if you have that policy in addition to the Code of Conduct and Privacy Policy. Similar to the other two mandatory documents, once you have the Terms of Service created, save it as a publicaly accessible web docuent as you'll need to enter the URL in your community settings within the dashboard.

Ensure that your most recent policies are listed in your community settings.

Any changes to your community policies will be logged in the admin audit log so you can track all changes to this setting.

When you update a policy, you can ask members to review and accept it again.

Your platform agreements carry a consent version, shown as Consent version 1 once you first save them. Each time you select Require re-acceptance, the version increases by one and the dashboard shows when that version was published, for example Consent version 9 · Published Aug 27, 2026.

The next time a signed-in member loads or navigates to a page, they see a Review updated policies message. Members who join after you publish a new version do not see it, because they accepted the latest policies when they signed up. If you publish two versions before a member returns, they only see the most recent one.

You can add a consent checkbox to your sign-up form so members can opt in to marketing email when they join.

Marketing email consent is off until you turn it on in Settings → Community → Legal & Policy Settings. Use Display on sign-up form to show the checkbox. You can write your own Checkbox Label of up to 100 characters, or select Revert to default to restore the standard wording. Default Status sets whether the checkbox is already selected when a member opens the sign-up form; it starts as Checked.

When a member accepts, they are subscribed to all of your current subscription types. See Email Communications.