Notes on building Klaas Academy — product updates, playbooks and the occasional postmortem.
Every platform in this category calls itself white-label. Most mean 'you can change the header image'. Here is the checklist that separates the two, including the one item on everyone's list that is quietly impossible.
A weekly call is the most reliable thing you can put in a community and the most annoying to administer. A practical walkthrough of recurrence, RSVP scopes, waitlists, calendar files and the reminders that actually get people there.
Completion rates in online courses are famously terrible, and the usual culprit is not the content. A practical guide to lesson types, drip release, quizzes that don't leak their own answers, and when sequencing helps.
A Discord server, a Facebook group and a course tool all host people talking. None of them is a community platform. The difference is one boring database row — and everything a host wants turns out to depend on it.
Who can get in and who can see it exists are different questions, and most community setups answer only the first. A practical guide to Klaas's access levels, visibility levels, and the lock screen that is supposed to do the selling.
Feature grids are designed to be tied. These are the questions that actually separate community platforms — including four that most vendors will not have a crisp answer to, which is itself the answer.
Most community gamification rewards volume, which is why most community gamification produces noise. Klaas has one scoring rule, a doubling level curve, no badges and no streaks — and points can go down.
Learning pathways in Klaas lock course three until course two is finished. There is no configuration, no admin exemption, and no member-facing pathway page. Every one of those absences was a decision.
We shipped a notification setting that gated nothing, moderator permissions that unlocked pages which then refused every action, and a preferences screen with two dropdowns nothing read. Here is what we removed and the rule we adopted.
Most community platforms hand you a custom-CSS field and call it branding. We deliberately did not. Here is the reasoning, the eleven looks you pick from instead, and the one setting a host is not allowed to override.