Deactivating a Community

Communities exist until all members leave them.  When the last member leaves, the community is marked inactive and archived.  For reasons described in the create a community section, you can't actually completely delete a community account.

Why would everyone leave the community?

• Maybe it was only ever meant to exist for a short period of time to accomplish a specific goal and that goal was achieved.
• Maybe it had poor leadership or the community just wasn't progressing so people decided to leave and go elsewhere.
• Maybe it's a business and the business is shutting down.
• Maybe everyone is migrating to the same community, just an updated version of the contract code.
• Some other reason...

There are many reasons why a community might stop operating.  Whatever the reason, Catalyst makes it easy to nicely close them down, extract any remaining free value in the contract and archive them.

Below you'll find a text version of what's happening in the video with more detailed descriptions of any related settings.

To Deactivate - Leave the Community

Deactivating a community requires that everyone leaves it.  If you are the last member, it will automatically be deactivated when you leave it.  Simply choose the leave community link from the main menu.  You'll see this form:

Couple things to point out here:

At the top, you'll get the notice that you are the last member and the balance shown (in yocto) there is the remaining free balance in the community account.  This number will likely be different than what you see in the community/escrow funds as it includes a portion of the amount (2 NEAR at time of writing) that it cost to set up the community. Approx 1.1 NEAR is going to remain in the contract because it needs to cover the cost of the storage.  Remember - we can't delete the account completely as there are no access keys on it (it's locked).

Next, you'll need to check the confirmation box ensuring you understand that as the last member, proceeding to leave will deactivate the community.

Once checked, just hit leave community.  You'll be asked to do two authorizations from your wallet and then you'll be taken to your dashboard where you'll see the community marked as inactive.  If you visit it, there will be a notice at the top saying it's been archived and you won't be able to interact with it.

And that's it - community is deactivated.  You can't reactivate it, it's permanent.  If you want to restart the community, you'll have to start from scratch with a new one.