At the moment, group owners can add new members to their group, but cannot make them owners. This can only be done by an admin or site moderator.
I think it would make sense if a group owner could manage group members including promoting them to group owner, and it seems fairly straightforward.
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Hello folks. I’m @uffehe’s dev, and I’m wondering if this is a feature that could potentially be acceptable as a candidate for a future release. The behavior seems generic enough, and could be enabled/disabled in the site_settings.
If there are no resources to spare on this, I could try my hand at implementing it. I’m pretty new to Discourse, but as far as I can determine, it seems to be a simple matter of changing group-member-dropdown.js for the UI, move add_owners and remove_owner from /admin/groups_controller.rb to just /groups_controller.rb, and making the corresponding change in routes.rb.
Do you think this feature looks Pull-Request-worthy, @codinghorror?
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@codinghorror can you think of any reason why would would not want “group owners” to assign “ownership” to other members of the group.
The general pattern out there in places like GitHub, filesystems and so on, is that owners can always assign new ownership
I support a PR here to change this, I don’t think we need a site setting.
Only big question I have is if you are allowed to demote yourself or remove yourself from a group when you are an owner. Mixed on this. I guess yes, but we should warn.
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Seems fine to me if it’s relatively easy we can go for it!
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Nice idea. Just wondering, should there be some type of notice/message generated that this happened? (In case of a rogue or misinformed group owner?)
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It should go in the admin log somewhere.
In fact the name “Staff Actions” is not ideal anymore, this should include “group moderator” actions for stuff like delete topic, it should also include “group manager” actions, like adding and removing a user etc.
It is a tricky problem cleaning this up, but certainly worth doing longer term.
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Hey folks. Not to rush or anything – we don’t need this feature immediately – but I’m wondering what the process is from here. Is there something I should be doing, like implementing it and making a Pull Request, or will this be handled by your team internally?
Just asking so I know if there’s something I need to be doing.
Thanks.
Hey there.
We’re also feeling this need.
We create groups on our Discourse instance to map to teams in our company. We trust those teams to completely manage their group (add new-joiners, remove people who have shifted around the organization).
The one missing piece is being able to make people who have joined the team group owners.
It seems reasonable that an option exists when creating a group to allow group owners to manage group ownership.
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But it turns out that group owners can remove other group owners from the group membership, and then add them again as ordinary members, which effectively means they can remove just owner status from other owners.
What I’d actually like to see (maybe as an additional group setting) is to explicitly allow just that (and more): for group owners to be able to promote other group members to owners and to demote other owners (or themselves) back to members.
Real life scenario:
- a group is defined for a subset of users
- group is used to manage access to private category and also to send (email) notifications to
@groupmembers - one member is elected a group leader by other members, and they can approve new members or remove existing members (based on group consensus, they only act as an executor)
- when the leader retires and wishes to either relinquish their role or even leave the group, site admin must be involved to appoint new group owner
It would be much easier if the current owner could promote another member(s) to owner(s), and demote themselves (or anyone else) from owner.
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Hello, folks! 
The ability for group owners to promote other owners has been merged in PR#19768. This will become baseline behaviour as of Discourse 3.1.
To deal with demotions properly, we want to build in some checks, e.g. a warning if a demotion will render a group “ownerless”. This requires some more work and planning, so we decided to release the promotion feature by itself first.
7 Likes