hello discourse community. here is axim from freiLand cultural center in Potsdam. We use discourse for our internal organisation and we are over 150 people using ist. It works fine. I have a question: We do not want that the groups or users can be seen from the public. In the administration settings you can make the users invisible to the public - “hide user profiles from public”. I find no way to adjust this in the same way also for the groups. There is a setting to make also the groups “invisible” but then this applies both to the public as well as the logged-in mode. That makes no sense if registered users can’t see the groups anymore. Did I miss something? all da best - axim

Is there a way to either make all groups hidden to everyone, or disable the hyperlink for groups a person is a member of on their own profile page? We are using some groups that automate via SSO to identify the types of users and potentially gate certain areas or our community. We don’t mind if users can see that they are part of a group, but we don’t want them to be able to see this info for anyone else. If I make the groups HIDDEN and turn off the directory then they only show up on my own profile if I’m a member of a group. But if I click on that group name I then see the whole list.

Any suggestions on this? We’d like to either Hide groups even on your own profile or Disable hyperlink to groups shown on own profile

I am also looking for option for making certain users and groups invisible. Option to be invisible can be granted by admin to certain groups. Reason is simple, some would like to join the forum and not be seen. And yet, people in general would like plugins like who’s online. I often want to make some changes to my forum but i get so many messages once online. A few minutes changes ends up wasting my half an hour. There is option to be anonymous but the admin section or certain group section is not available on it.

I have a feeling a better approach would not to have this be a Group setting, but a new Who’s Online plugin setting. Something like a “I’m busy / short on time and I don’t want to come across as being rude by ignoring members right now” setting to toggle “reveal my presence - hide my presence”.

I am one of the users of that specific discourse and due to this setting, it is not possible to have any category published to the public. We are running a makerspace as part of the project and would like to share at least technical discussions with a broader community. I understand and support the need of hiding users and groups from the public. Is there any way to have a mostly closed discourse while publishing some categories to the outside ? If not: do you see a chance that this could be implemented by some plugin ?

We have the same situation and the same need.

Can you explain your actual use case here, curious to see if we can work something else out.

I’m a group owner on the site, rather than the admin - who is currently looking at this. Hence my answer may be a bit sketchy. I’ve asked him to consider a suggestion from one of your staff to solve this for us, but can’t try it myself - and looking at it more closely, it doesn’t cover public vs members of the site. [image]On another topic They can. On the groups page ( /groups ), interaction tab, you can change the group’s visibility. Visibility defaults to “everyone”, but you can choose to limit it to Group owners, members and admins , Group owners and staff , or Group owners and admins instead. Our site has multiple categories which are private, and one public category. I noticed that our (and all other) groups in our site were visible to the public, along with the members and their photos and user profiles. Many of our users would not like this. When I raised this with the admin, he agreed that this was not appropriate and hid the groups. However, he couldn’t find a way to do this without also hiding our public category. So what we need is a way to keep the public category visible while limiting what user information the public can access. I hope that makes sense.

I’m confused here. Changing group visibility does not affect the visibility of categories. As mentioned in the other topic, if you change the visibility from everyone to Group owners, members and admins, it will not be visible to the public. You can see how this works right here on Meta. If you look at https://meta.discourse.org/groups you’ll see ~10 groups. We actually have over 40 groups, but most are private. Setting the group visibility has not affected your ability to view categories here on Meta when not logged in. In the case of the site mentioned in the other topic, your admin made the site login required. That will prevent access to everything when not logged in. If your goal is to limit group visibility only, the login_required site setting is not what you want.

Thank you Josh; I’ll pass this on too and hopefully we’ll be sorted.

Make groups invisible to the public

Product Support

jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld) January 16, 2022, 4:22pm 27

To close this topic out, a visibility option for “Logged on users” was added a couple of years ago.

Topic		Replies	Views
What about private groups? Feature	11	5274	June 18, 2014
Semi-Private Groups Feature	15	1555	November 4, 2020
Hidden Group Membership Feature	30	6026	July 19, 2017
Why are Groups all Visible? Feature	7	1249	May 16, 2017
Group owners cannot see group if "Group is visible to all users" is off Bug groups	10	3154	February 3, 2017

Make groups invisible to the public

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