Add a Sortable Group Join Date and Admin Options to Hide Group Detail Page Columns/Tabs
I’d like to see three updates to the group detail page (default URL path /groups/YourGroupName) to both simplify and limit confusion for our group members and group owners. Thanks in advance for considering this, awesome Discourse devs!
Sortable Group Join Date
Currently, the existing Posted and Seen group detail page columns don’t help our group owners know who has been active in the forum category associated with their group (e.g., the WritersOfWords group would have an associated forum category URL path of /c/groups/writers-of-words).
If anything, it confuses them and fellow group members to find out that the date and time in these two columns is when a user last posted or was last seen anywhere in the forum – which the vast majority of the time has nothing to do with group activity.
It would be more helpful to have a new, sortable Group Join Date column with the following attributes:
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Displays the date (or time if within the last 24 hours) that the member joined the group. If the group requires approval to join, the date displayed would be when the group member was approved to join, not when they requested to join.
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Sortable in the same way the Posted and Seen columns are sortable (e.g., descending and ascending date).
With this new Group Join Date field, our group owners could see, on-demand, who has joined their group recently and better reach out to new group members in a timely fashion. New group members could also use the sortable field to see which group members have been around for a while and reach out to an experienced one if they need group specific help.
Admin Options to Hide Group Detail Page Columns
The Posted column would be highly useful to group owners if the date or time displayed was limited to when a user last had activity in the forum category associated with their group. The Seen column would be more useful if it were renamed to "Last Seen in Forum," or something else more intuitive.
Short of these changes, I’d rather have the option to display or not display all group detail page Members tab columns except Username, which I feel should always be there. This would reduce the confusion people have about the nature and implications of some fields they’d be better off not even knowing about.
From my perspective, the natural place to allow Discourse admins to decide which columns should show up on a group detail page is the groups site settings at /admin/site_settings/category/groups.
A new site setting option could look like this:
Hide the Activity or Messages Tab on the Group Detail Page
While I’m at it, I have one more group detail page request that will simplify and eliminate confusion.
Since I imagine limiting the activity shown on the group detail page at /groups/YourGroupName/activity/posts to just the activity in the forum category associated with the group is too difficult, I’d like to hide the Activity tab completely. As it is, the Activity tab in each group shows the general forum activity for all members in the group – which is really confusing to people who are used to Facebook groups and just generally counter-intuitive to many of our community members.
Since we have direct messaging to groups turned off for all our groups, the presence of the Messages tab also is a distraction for us.
From my perspective, the natural place to allow Discourse admins to decide whether to display the Activity and Messages tabs on the group detail page is the groups site settings at /admin/site_settings/category/groups.
A new site setting option could look like this:
Implementing one or all of these group detail page related feature requests would go a long way to relieve some long-term pain our group owners and group members have.