On my site I have a use case for people being given the privilege of managing group membership without being a member of the group themselves. I assumed this is how it worked and was surprised to see that someone I added as group manager is now also a group member.
The use case? We use groups to assign badges. And to give access to private categories. And the people responsible for doing this are not always group members.
Edit: having noticed this, I then removed some group owners only to realize they are still group members. Seems to me these should be managed independently.
We ran into this problem this week, too. (Although our groups represent a “group” membership outside of Discourse, too.) But that membership is not decided by a member of the group, and not by a Discourse admin, either.
Just ran into this very problem, where a group’s membership is not administered by a member of the group.
Our use case
We want a handful of non-Discourse-admins to be able to manage group membership for several groups without becoming members of those groups themselves.
Extra credit
This is probably asking too much, but I thought I’d throw it in… it’d be awesome if a group could be named as admin of another group (i.e., membership of the @bar group can be managed by any member of the @foo group). This would allow us to have a “group managers” group containing our non-Discourse-admins in charge of managing other groups’ memberships.
I just moved this to the #feature:voting category as I’d like it to be thrown into the mix for voting when that starts happening.
I like this idea! There is one person in charge of managing internal groups in my community but does not need to have admin privileges. It would be helpful to be able to set up a group for this so we can easily add/remove people to help her.
Another related feature that would be needed is the ability for group owners to see and manage the group even when “Group is visible to all users” is deselected. There should also be the option to allow group members, or members of a specific other group, to see the group.
Any chance the goal of “group owner does not need to be group member” with stretch goal of “group can be named as owner of another group” would be suitable for a GSoC project?
Did anything come from the OPs request to separate group membership & group ownership? @sam supported the idea a while back (above).
Scenario: We added a moderator to a group, to manage group membership. However, this resulted in him getting the group’s badge displayed on his avatar.
Thanks for the reply, @Biscuit! I just came across this again in my community and the issue persists. In fact, it’s becoming a bit of a problem because certain leaders in my community complain that they are not trusted to properly manage the groups they are charged with managing. They have to ask an admin to add/remove people. I’m trying to keep down the number of admins (a conversation for another day).
It’s pr-welcome so the discourse team have indicated they are open to having it done as a community contribution. Any takers?
It appears to me that with the new front-end groups management interface, there is no obvious place to list owners who are not members. Perhaps the answer is simply to just list them at the top, with the Owner badge but not the date added, posted or seen. And/or to list with a highlight color, as on staff posts?
Then the functionality to add owners could be a + ADD OWNERS button next to the existing + ADD MEMBERS button. Selecting this would pop up a modal to add one or more owners. On the list, if the REMOVE MEMBER button is selected and the member is an owner, the user would remain on the list as an owner but not as a member. If REMOVE AS OWNER is selected, the user would remain as a member but no longer as an owner (unless the user is not already a member and was only listed as an owner, in which case the user would be removed from the list entirely).
We have the use case that there should be one master group that manages many smaller groups (~30 / i.e. @Archangels manage local Angel communities). They should not have to be members of all 30 groups, just be able to add/remove members.
Yes, hello, I have this problem as well and I will give you an example of the questions it raises, which are a bit annoying. As a group creator and owner, there must be a default group manager, which is me, the administrator, and I cannot appoint someone else. Because there is no reason for that person to manage a group that I created myself. There should be group members and a group administrator, but the administrator does not, in my opinion, have to be automatically a member of that group. Here is the problem this poses in my case.
I use the expert category plugin. So I have assigned certain categories to a group of experts. Unfortunately, I am automatically considered an expert in this group, which is not good at all, because when I post a new topic, it says that I am contributing as an expert when I am not an expert on the theme of this group at all. Well, I don’t know if I am making myself clear.
Hi Patrick! While I still think this feature request is legit, I am not sure I understand your use case.
Are group owners required by Discourse Category Experts? Otherwise it’s possible to create groups without owners and then you can just manage who is in the group as admin, without being in the group.
You need group owners for the feature that allows users to request membership to the group.
I think it makes sense in the context that users need to request to become members and not decide they are experts on their own. I think you do something similar with the @support-explorers group, don’t you?
@patrickemin I reported a bug last year that could help you avoid being added as a member of the group. But you’d need to find a workflow so that you frequently check if there are new requests in the request tab of the group because you won’t receive the messages in that case.
But it’s possible to remove yourself from the group after enabling membership requests:
Thanks @moin! I am always impressed by how knowledgeable you are about Discourse.
I was just reasoning through the rationale why a group owner is required for the “Allow users to send membership requests” setting to be enabled and it does make sense to me. You would not want to be in a situation where all moderators have to be pinged when someone requests to join a group. So yes in this case you would also want it to be possible for the group owner to not be a member of the group.
In my opinion, a fairly simple solution would be for requests to join a group to be sent not only to the group owner, if there is one, but also to the administrator. That way, if there is no group owner, the administrator would still be notified and would not have to be either the group owner or a member of the group.
