Allow replies to Group topics without being a group member

Hello @DannyPancratz thank you for creating this idea! I think you spotted a bug, you should be a member of a group to be able to post a topic in that group. 

I'm curious to understand why you would like to keep that behavior?

I'm understanding that your bigger issue is to make those groups accessible to all users based on their role to post and reply. Is that correct?

If this is a bug, fixing it would be very problematic for us, as we’ve chosen a group-heavy* approach based on the functionality that users can post to groups via main Create Topic button in the navigation menu (same functionality / UX as posting to community categories). 

I want to keep that behavior of Create Topic > Post to Group (even if not a group member) for a smooth and simple UX. 

I guess the bug I’d like to fix is a prompt for them to join the group in order to reply, the idea from LPortalupi linked above. That would solve the common pain point we’re hearing from beta testers (“why I can’t I reply to this post?”). A message or button to join the group would address that, as well as drive our desired behavior: joining groups.  

This idea was to present a potentially simpler alternative: allow replies even for non-group members. Although it doesn’t drive group sign-ups in the same way LPortalupi’s idea does. 


*(Our biz case for that choice is that showing the group roster and presenting more ways to showcase the people in our community and encourage peer-to-peer connections)

@DannyPancratz I am really sorry to say this is an unexpected behaviour, that you should have to be a member to post in a group, otherwise it bypasses the need to join the group in the first place, so its something we’re going to be changing in the near future. 

And as we’re a SaaS platform we can’t patch this for all other communities and not yours. That if you want people to post without needing to join they may need to consider community categories instead of specific groups.  cc @Shane1 

However, I agree that we need to improve the UX in order to indicate that you need to be a member to join a reply. I will keep that in mind for when we will resume work on groups. 

This is a major blow to our site strategy and planned UX just days before our planned global launch (March 1). 

I really wish this would have come up when I asked about this both during our implementation and in this post on the community. 

I get that I have exposed a bug, but I made strategic decisions based on the functionality that I saw on the platform. I never expected functionality would go away as bugs were patched and features rolled out. Even though I understand the bug, it does not make me any less unhappy by the impact this will have on our success. 

Hi @DannyPancratz, end users have never been able to post topics or replies to Groups they aren’t a member of. You can only post in any group if you’re not a member if you are a moderator or admin, and do it from control. So I’m guessing during your testing this is why you thought it would be possible?

But across all social sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook etc. you need to join a group before being able to post there. So I think the end users will also expect this to be the case.

But it could be worth reconsidering using Groups vs Community Categories due to this

Thanks, @Shane1. I hadn’t considered that might be why I was seeing the option to create a new topic. Oof. Does the platform offer a way to view the community from the perspective of a specific user?

It’s too late for us to reconsider the architecture of our site and Groups are still much preferred to community categories for us. The roster, join CTA, auto-post in that group, and look and feel is a much closer fit to our ideal. I guess we’ll have to just teach the action of joining groups as a high priority in our onboarding. 
 

As for our chief pain point of not being able to reply to group conversations they see, I’m hoping this idea is something that could be something considered soon. It would address the FAQ we get and drive group sign ups, which is what we want.