Option to have private groups hidden

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. 

@Marion Frecaut thank you making this happen -- are we able to convert existing private groups to hidden groups?

Hello @justine.rae ! Yes you are :) By simply clicking on the edit group button you will see the option available!

Hello @Scott Baldwin you can now move any topic from any category or group to hidden groups. Thanks again for raising this :)

Thanks @Marion Frecaut — that worked.

As I was moving things though I noticed that the hidden groups don’t appear in the content filters in Control. When I select FILTER > PUBLISHED IN the hidden groups don’t appear.

It also would have been nice to be able to select all relevant posts at once and use the the MOVE TO button to shift from a category to a group. In this case only categories appear, so you have to go in topic-by-topic and change the Forum dropdown to the hidden group.

Out of curiosity, any plans to offer a way to archive a group once a group’s work has finished or the group is no longer needed? It would helpful to get them out of the list of overall groups and also could automatically remove the members that were part of the group and let them know it has been archived. If not, please let me know and I can create yet another IDEA.

Hello @Scott Baldwin you are absolutely right to ask for such filters and bulk actions. I created a ticket and we will make sure to implement this shortly.

Concerning your question about being able to archive groups, we have no short term plans around it so far. An idea about it would be great indeed