Suppose you have a large number of groups and to save clutter in the groups list you want private groups to be hidden, not publicly visible.
But rather than have owners add people in response to a request received by by some other means you would like to enable users to request access to the group using the same dialogue as they get when they click the request button on an invite group.
There is an admin option for a group to allow users to send membership requests:
but this only works for a group where the visibility is set to logged on users or everyone, the option is greyed out if the group is not visible.
The Request button brings up a modal dialogue which sends a message to the owners of a group.
Is there either another way to bring up this dialogue from a link that could be posted in a category where you might want to alert members to the existence of the private group and request to join it, or is there a simple message address like @groupname-owners that would enable people to message the owners of a private group with a request to join.
Aren’t these contradictory desires? The group is private… yet people should somehow know about the group and be able to request access to it? I’m just not sure how to handle that in a sensible way?
There is already massive confusion in our userbase about groups vs forums (categories).
The groups list is pretty unwieldy if you have more than a few dozen forums, even with a fairly strict naming convention for groups and forums.
So the concept is to have a reception area for a top level category, which contains many forums as subcategories, and have a list of available forums there, including the private ones where appropriate (most but not all of them) with a button or link to join immediately for the public ones, and to send a request to join the private ones that are listed.
That way we can keep the groups list just for public forums that any member can browse and join immediately, and make most private groups accessible to people with access to the top level category by requesting an invite (so they can be filtered by the coordinator)
It works fine but the missing piece is the ability to automatically generate a message to the group owner(s) to request join - we have to publish a contact to DM, then a maintenance headache as people change function etc. Not elegant.
