I have a handful of new users who have joined recently. I want to add them to a testing group. I open the group and click on “add users”, and there, I have to remember their name or email to find them, and who is already in the group and who is not.
If I go through the Users listing, I need to clic on the user to open the details for that user, and then I clic on the Groups tab and… instead of getting a list of groups that user is part of, I am back on the main Groups page?
When I’m looking at the list of users IN a group, I have a little wrench for each of them that allows me to easily remove that person for the group.
Shouldn’t adding be as simple?
What I’d imagine: instead of making me type a name or e-mail when I want to add a user, show me a drop-down list of all users (allow me to filter by group or typing part of the name) where I can just clic on those I want to add. Or at the bottom of the list of the users “in the group”, add those that aren’t, greyed out for example, with an option to “include”.
And in the users listing: it would be helpful to be able to have an overview of which user is in which group. Maybe even a table with all the users and all the groups, and quick links to add or remove (with confirmation dialog to prevent accidents)?
I’m hoping my explanation is understandable, let me know if it isn’t.
« Quite » is the key word here. What if I don’t know what to start typing? I see nothing. Maybe a first step would be a scrollable list of all users not in group instead of nothing?
Maybe, but I’m not sure it would help much. Great for a small forum of <50 people, but imagine you have 1000s of users… Scrollable list won’t help much (and not sure if technically even feasible).
I think I like your other idea of somehow adding more actions from the user list better. However, that of course would be a much bigger change than UX.
This is also possibly a « young community » need. When you’re starting out, migrating people from elsewhere, setting things up as you go along… maybe once the community is larger and established it doesn’t really happen anymore, and if it does, given the numbers in the game it’s maybe more likely to be dealt with in other manners.
For me as a « young admin » it’s also the accumulation of this kind of issue that makes the whole « getting started with Discourse » experience frustrating overall.
It would go nicely in the direction of making it easier for people unfamiliar with Discourse to get started!
Oh I 100% get your frustration. We really are trying but there is so much to balance: as you say, big vs small communities, legacy compatibility, customisation,… It’s a very big, complex project and changes are hard to make.
Some sort of bulk select feature on the user directory (/u) could be interesting for this. I’d imagine something similar to bulk selecting topics where you could scroll through the list, check the people you want, and then get access to a bulk features like adding to groups, granting badges, etc
That’s just what I was thinking. I can see how it’s awkward, but this kind of bulk user-grouping operation might be relatively uncommon. Later on it’s more onesey/twosey kind of stuff. Tweaks to this aspect could certainly be something to add to a “make migration from FB easier” list.
