I have the Wp-discourse plugin installed so I could use WordPress as my SSO provider but I have no idea how that would allow me to require joining a group (or indeed how I would hand over any data apart from name and email to discourse). Could you explain?
My use case is the following: my forum aims to bring together people with an interest in the same topic but who have approached this topic from very different angles, indeed from very different roles. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say they come from a variety of different occupations. So I have a list of occupations or occupation types that might join and I have created a group for each of them.
Now, why do I want to force people to choose one of these groups? Several reasons.
- It allows me to automatically set every user’s title according to their group, i.e. their title will show their occupation. To explain why it is a crucial resource for users to see each other’s occupation would lead too far here, just trust me that it is.
- It allows any user to @-mention the members of an occupation, for example in the format “So what do s have to say about this question?”. Admittedly, this is somewhat experimental and may have to be turned off for ordinary members if it leads to too much spam mentions. But even so, for admins it will be useful to be able to address different occupations differently.
- statistical reasons: I will have a better idea of the composition of my membership, for example to be able to focus mobilising efforts on certain, underrepresented constituencies. (This could be done with custom fields too, but I believe groups would make it easier to keep an eye on various constituencies.)
- It gives users the possibility to communicate within their own constituency if they wish, reducing the risk of being alienated by all those strange people from other occupations.
I guess your example of game forums is more straightforward…