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Your community site is reachable at a Tightknit subdomain by default, and can be moved to a domain you own. Both settings live at Site > Domain & URL in Studio.
Domain and URL settings in Studio

Domain and URL settings in Studio

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Subdomain

Your community site subdomain determines your default URL: your-subdomain.tightknit.community. Edit it in Studio and it saves automatically. A subdomain can be up to 63 characters long, may only contain lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores, and must start and end with a letter or number. A subdomain that another community already uses, or a reserved word such as tightknit, is not allowed.
If you are not on a custom domain, changing the subdomain changes the URL of every page on your site. Links you have already shared will break, and search engines will need to re-index the new URLs. Change it early, or not at all.

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Custom domain

A custom domain hosts your community site on a domain you own, for example community.your-domain.com. A custom domain is worth setting up for three reasons:
  • Brand continuity. Members stay on your domain rather than being sent to a third-party URL.
  • SEO. Search authority accrues to your own domain instead of tightknit.community.
  • Site analytics. Traffic analytics are only available on custom domains.
Custom domains are configured by Tightknit. Contact support to set one up or to change an existing one. Once configured, your current custom domain is shown on the Domain & URL page.
When a custom domain is active, the subdomain is no longer used for your site’s public URLs.

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Corporate networks and URL filtering

A new custom domain has no browsing history, so corporate web filters such as Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering classify it from whatever their crawler can see. A community site that redirects straight to a sign-in page shows the crawler nothing but a login wall, and the domain can be filed under a category that IT policies block outright. For example, if a custom domain is classified as “Web-based-Email”, members on a corporate network may be blocked from opening the site until their IT adds an exception. Before you invite members who work behind a corporate firewall, ask their IT team to allowlist:
  • Your custom domain, for example community.your-domain.com. For a bare domain, include both your-domain.com and *.your-domain.com.
  • api.tightknit.ai
  • cdn.tightknit.ai
  • assets.tightknit.ai
If a member reports a “Website blocked” page, see The community site is blocked by a corporate firewall.

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Custom email domain

A custom email domain is a separate setting from your site domain. It controls the address that notification and sign-in emails are sent from. See Custom email domain and the DNS setup guide.