Community Setup

This guide walks through creating and configuring a TinyLVT community.

Before You Start

Choose your currency mode first. This cannot be changed after community creation. See Currency Modes to understand your options.

If you choose Backed Credits, you also select the currency’s denomination (USD, EUR, or GBP) at creation, and it too cannot be changed later. See Card Payments for connecting a Stripe account and enabling card-backed bidding.

Creating a Community

Log in to TinyLVT
Go to Communities and click “Create Community”
Enter your community name
Select your currency mode and configure its settings
Click “Create”

You’ll be the community Leader with full administrative access.

Community Structure

Communities are organized as follows:

Community — The group of people sharing resources. Has members, roles, and currency settings.

Site — A location or logical grouping of spaces. A site defines a collection of spaces that are auctioned together. Examples: “Main Office”, “Parking Garage”, “Practice Rooms”.

Space — An individual unit within a site that can be possessed by one member at a time. Examples: “Desk 1”, “Spot A-15”, “Room 101”.

Auction — A time-bounded event associated with a site, where all of that site’s spaces are allocated for a possession period.

Category — An optional label grouping similar spaces (e.g., “Standard booth”). Categories belong to the community and are shared across its sites. They enable bidder caps and one-step value entry — see Auctions.

Member Roles

Role	Can do
Member	Participate in auctions, receive distributions
Moderator	+ Add/remove members, set active status, see invite provenance, clear profile links
Coleader	+ Full community management (sites, spaces, auctions, moderators)
Leader	+ Manage coleaders, transfer leadership

Coleaders have full administrative control over the community. The Leader role exists to provide final authority: only the Leader can promote or demote Coleaders, and only the Leader can transfer leadership to someone else.

Inviting Members

Go to your community’s Invites page
Create an invite — either an open invite link anyone can use, or an invite addressed to a specific email
Share the link with people you want to join
They’ll create an account (if needed) and join your community

Open invite links can be single-use or multi-use. Email-addressed invites are always single-use.

Invites keep a record of who joined through them. Once a single-use invite is accepted, or an invite that members joined through is revoked, it stays in the issued list as a closed, read-only record. In the member list, moderators see which invite email each member joined through (“Invited: [email protected]”), which connects self-chosen usernames to the people you invited without exposing anyone’s account email. Revoking an invite nobody used simply removes it.

Member Profiles

Members can add a profile link to their entry in the member list — a website or social handle shown under their username, so others can see who they are. Set yours from your own row’s menu in the member list. Moderators can clear an inappropriate link.

Active vs Inactive Members

Active members can bid in auctions. In Distributed Clearing mode they also receive their share of auction proceeds, and in Points Allocation mode they receive allowances.

Inactive members remain in the community and keep their account, but can’t place bids and don’t receive distributions. Bids they already hold when deactivated stay in place. This is useful for:

Members who are temporarily away
Members who must meet a requirement before renting space, such as a vendor whose seller’s permit needs to be on file before each market

Moderators toggle active status from the member list, and the community’s currency settings choose whether newly joined members start out active. A community that checks requirements before allowing bids would have new members start inactive and activate them once cleared.

Creating Sites and Spaces

From your community page, click “Create Site”
Name the site and configure settings
Add spaces to the site with names and descriptions

Tip: Think about how spaces relate to each other. If people often want adjacent spaces together, consider creating bundles.

Reserve Prices

Each space has a reserve price — the starting price the first bid is placed at. The default of zero works for most cases, but you can change it per space:

Positive reserve: No one wins the space unless they value it above this threshold. Useful when the space has value when left common (e.g. a shared living room that stays common unless someone pays enough to host an event).
Negative reserve: Turns the auction into a chore auction. Bidding opens at the negative amount and rises toward zero; the winner is compensated rather than charged. Set the reserve to the largest compensation the community is willing to offer.

See Auctions for how reserves shape bidding.

Running Your First Auction

Navigate to a site
Click “Create Auction”
Set the auction parameters:
- Name and description (optional; the description can be edited later, the name cannot)
- Start time
- Round duration
- Bid increment
- Possession period
Members can enter proxy bids before the auction starts
The auction runs automatically at the scheduled time

To limit how much each bidder can win by category, create the auction as capped and assign per-bidder caps from the auction’s Settings tab — entered by hand or carried over from a concluded auction’s results. See Auctions for how caps work.

In Backed Credits communities with card payments enabled, auctions must finish within 48 hours of starting, and members place card holds in the 24 hours before the start. See Card Payments for how this shapes scheduling.

Learn more about Auctions and Currency Modes.