Option to have private groups hidden

Hi @justine.rae ! Thanks a lot for your idea. Indeed it makes a lot of sense, @cherise already mentioned it. It's part of the improvements we wish to do for groups. It's not planned for the short term, but I'll keep you posted when we plan it.

Hi @Marion Frecaut any update on this request? We have the exact same need as @justine.rae and it would be important for us to be able to control which private groups shall be hidden from the rest of the community or not. 

Hello @Anitahg this is still very much on our radar when it comes to improvements on groups. I can't give a precise ETA but we have definitely planning to offer that capability. 

Thanks @Marion Frecaut will it be this calendar year? Would really like to know so we can plan moving of private groups we currently have in the Community section:)

I can't commit to anything but let's say it would be very surprising if this is not done this year

Hello everyone! We are investigating the best way to do hidden groups at the moment. 

Between the two following options which would you prefer?

• Have a hidden group that is only visible to user with a specific role (primary or custom). User with that role can see the content within the group and are free to join
• Have a hidden group that is visible to members only. So you would need to invite each members for them to see the group

I'm curious to get everyone thoughts on this especially  @Anitahg @justine.rae @ZapierSteph 

Hello @Marion Frecaut if it was only one or the other option available I would prioritize this one first:

• Have a hidden group that is visible to members only. So you would need to invite each members for them to see the group

Appreciate the opportunity for input.

Hi, for us we would need this: “Have a hidden group that is visible to members only. So you would need to invite each members for them to see the group”

The first option is not relevant for us as the members of hidden groups will not be linked to a specific role (primary or custom). Thanks for listening! 

Having different options for Group Visibility: 

• Public 
• Private
• Unlisted

Yes! This. Absolutely this please :-)

We’re looking to setup a group for internal users only and want it to be hidden from most of our community. This would make our life a lot easier.

Thanks!

I have a simple question about permissions.

Currently:

• Moderators have access to all topics (from groups and categories) in the moderation overview in Control. 
• Moderators don't have access to the groups details pages in Control. They can't edit groups (type, description...) or manage the users

The question is: Should moderators see the content from hidden group in the topic moderation overview page in Control? Or should that content be restricted to community managers and admins.

@tiffany.oda @Kgastaldo @Selina @ZapierSteph @justine.rae @Casstastr0phee @Anitahg @victorlacombe @Scott Baldwin @security_lion  I'm curious to get your opinion on this :)

@Marion Frecaut for us it will be important that CSMs and product managers can upload content in hidden groups, and those are normally also moderators, so for us, a definite yes

@Marion Frecaut I don’t have a strong opinion on this. There may be scenarios where moderators should see content from hidden groups and scenarios where they shouldn’t. Maybe it should be a setting for the individual moderator’s profile.

Thank you both for the input :)

I agree with @Scott Baldwin  to have the ability to select the permission individually. Here is another scenario to consider - we will have community-led groups next year for our user group program, and we’d want these members (who go through a leader application process) to be able to manage and moderate their group. So ideally, during their onboarding period, we provision them with some sort of Group Manager access where they can remove/add/allow people, edit the group, pin posts, etc. I’m not sure currently what role this would fall under or if it exists. 

@Marion Frecaut agree it would be great to customize moderator access for hidden groups vs a definitive yes or no access decision...this allows for flexibility.

Hello everyone! I''m happy to announce that we now have a beta version of hidden groups available for you to test out  !

@Hiewwaiy @Nadia2 @Kgastaldo @Selina @ZapierSteph @owenmcintyre @justine.rae @Christa Brown  @Casstastr0phee @Anitahg @alexfarmer1 @victorlacombe @Laura D. @Scott Baldwin @security_lion @tiffany.oda @yumdarling @Onomatopoeia I enabled the feature for you to test it out.

Here is a KB article to give an overview of how hidden groups are different from public and private groups:

• The different group types: Public, Private and Hidden groups

You can create a hidden group exactly like you would create a public or private group. As hidden groups are not yet released, I haven''t updated yet all the KB group article so do let me know if you have any questions!

As this is a beta feature all feedback is welcomed! So please share :)

@Marion Frecaut this is fantastic.

Overall works great from a visibility perspective. My only asks:

• Provide a way to invite people to the group with a link. In our case we want to run programs product betas in this group and often members are not in the community already. The invite link functionality as we have on private groups, is critical here.
• Provide a way to get notifications when people join the group so we can engage. I have other ideas on this theme which we’ve talked about a bit. To me this would just be bringing what you have already in private groups over to hidden groups with some slight tweaks

Hello @Scott Baldwin thanks a lot for your input.

The main reason we don't offer invite links on hidden groups is for security purposes. Basically invite links can be used by anyone so that means that it can be shared and potential users can join without you having control. For hidden groups we preferred to have the most secure way.

To have a better understand of you need let me ask: Would you say the main thing you need is to invite users to hidden groups that don't already have an account no matter the way (invite links or email invites) or do you really prefer the invite links method?

@Marion Frecaut

We prefer the invite links method here. 

That said, ideally the invitation methods would be the same across public, private, and hidden groups rather than different for each group type.

I’d have the option to invite by:

• username (if they are in the community)
• by email address via inSided (if they are or aren’t which would give them a unique link); or
• with an invite link that I share via another communication channel (if they are or aren’t)
•  

Then the experience would be:

• If a member they’d log into the community, be added, and have access
• If not a member, they’d have to signup for the community, then would get access

The key here is to make it easy to reach people and engage them in joining while also allowing us to merchandise and display what groups we want on the Groups page.

Here’s some examples:

• I might have a group of existing community members that live in a particular country that I want to invite to a new group for that country. In this case I could use the username approach (though slightly time consuming)
• I might know some folks that work in the same space as one of my groups and want to extend an invite to them to join either via email or with an invite link they can use to get access
• I might have a closed beta or closed group that I want a mix of existing and non-community members to join. I’d want to invite them easily via username, email, or a invite link

For our betas today we use the invite links method. We share a link with those people that are invited to join the beta and they can join easily. We’re not worried about people sharing links as they don’t and this works well. And if we have someone join that shouldn’t be, we can always remove them. And if they persist we can ban them from our community (not that I’ve had to do that)

Hope that helps. Really important to me that we get this right. Else groups will fail to be valuable to us on inSided and will limit options in terms of how we grow into them and can engage others.

@Marion Frecaut I created a hidden group and have attempted to move content from what was a hidden category to that hidden group but the hidden group doesn’t appear in the Forum dropdown on a topic. Is there a reason hidden groups aren’t available in the dropdown? If so that would be an issue for us as we want to migrate some things from hidden categories to hidden groups.

Hello @Scott Baldwin thanks a lot for your feedback that is really clear. I really appreciate it! 

First I totally get you point about being able to invite unregistered users to join groups that makes a lot of sense.

About offering invite links to hidden, thanks for sharing your use case that is very helpful. I'm curious to hear from other about offering this invite method in hidden groups. Would you use it? Is security a concern? 

@Marion Frecaut I created a hidden group and have attempted to move content from what was a hidden category to that hidden group but the hidden group doesn’t appear in the Forum dropdown on a topic. Is there a reason hidden groups aren’t available in the dropdown? If so that would be an issue for us as we want to migrate some things from hidden categories to hidden groups.

Thanks a lot for spotting this. This not the desired behaviour. We will fix this asap and allow you to move topics from categories to groups.